The Israeli-backed and U.S.-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said that its distribution on Thursday would only be for Palestinian women. Eyewitnesses say that GHF staff pepper-sprayed them and beat them with batons, while two women were killed.
Children in Gaza have begun to die of severe malnutrition in increasing numbers as Israel continues to starve the people of Gaza. Infants are the most severely affected, as hunger devours their bodies until they reach “a point of no return.”
Israel shelled Gaza’s only Catholic church on Thursday, killing three and wounding several others. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later said it was a “mistake.”
“This was not aid distribution,” said Ahmed Abu Amra, who witnessed gas bombs being fired at aid seekers at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site. “It was a real massacre committed against the hungry who came hoping to get some food.”
For weeks, I have been reporting on the daily massacres at ‘aid distribution’ sites in Gaza. When I speak to people, including friends, who risk their lives every day to get some food, I can’t help but think of what I would do in that situation.
On Sunday, Israel bombed a water distribution point in the central Gaza Strip, as dozens of civilians, mostly women and children, waited in line for water. Twelve people were killed, eight of them children. It was not the first time.
Israeli forces carried out another massacre at an aid center in southern Gaza run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Witnesses described Israeli tanks shooting toward the crowds with machine guns and soldiers sniping aid-seekers in the head.
Nasser Hospital, the last medical center still operating in southern Gaza, is threatened with shutting down as the Israeli army tightens its siege on the area. The hospital warns that fuel shortages will turn the facility into a “silent graveyard.”
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has taken over the aid system in Gaza on behalf of the Israeli army by cultivating a local network of companies and organizations to collaborate in its operations. The organizations that refused have been shut down.
After the U.S.-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation accused Hamas of attacking two American employees at its distribution center, eyewitnesses and local journalists say the GHF fired grenades on the crowd first before aid-seekers threw them back at them.