The Israeli army killed Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and five of his colleagues in a targeted strike on a journalists’ tent outside al-Shifa Hospital. The attack has effectively wiped out all of Al Jazeera’s staff in Gaza City.
As limited aid trickles into Gaza, Israel’s strategy of ‘engineering chaos’ by shooting at aid-seekers and permitting looters to steal aid ensures that food doesn’t get to starving Palestinians.
The WFP reported on how the Israeli army opened fire on a crowd of starving civilians rushing an aid convoy in northern Gaza, which killed 90 people. The Israeli army lied and said no one was shot. Eyewitnesses describe a massacre.
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.