Israeli strike kills hungry Gaza family in their sleep
The family - freelance journalist Wala al-Jaabari, her husband and their five children - were among more than 100 people killed in 24 hours of Israeli strikes or gunfire, according to health officials.
Their corpses lay in white shrouds outside their bombed home on Wednesday with their names scribbled in pen. Blood seeped through the shrouds as they lay there, staining them red.
"This is my cousin. He was 10. We dug them out of the rubble," Amr al-Shaer, holding one of the bodies after retrieving it.
Iman al-Shaer, another relative who lives nearby, said the family hadn't eaten anything before the bombs came down. "The children slept without food," he said.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike at the family's home, but said its air force had struck 120 targets throughout Gaza in the past day, including "terrorist cells, military structures, tunnels, booby-trapped structures, and additional terrorist infrastructure sites".
Relatives said some neighbours were spared only because they had been out searching for food at the time of the strike.
Ten more Palestinians died overnight from starvation, the Gaza health ministry said, bringing the total number of people who have starved to death to 111, most of them in recent weeks as a wave of hunger crashes on the Palestinian enclave.
The World Health Organization said on Wednesday 21 children under the age of five were among those who died of malnutrition so far this year. It said it had been unable to deliver any food for nearly 80 days between March and May and that a resumption of food deliveries was still far below what is needed.
In a statement on Wednesday, 111 organisations, including Mercy Corps, the Norwegian Refugee Council and Refugees International, said mass starvation was spreading even as tons of food, clean water and medical supplies sit untouched just outside Gaza, where aid groups are blocked from accessing them.
Israel, which cut off all supplies to Gaza from the start of March and reopened it with new restrictions in May, says it is committed to allowing in aid but must control it to prevent it from being diverted by militants. It says it has let enough food into Gaza during the war and blames Hamas for the suffering of Gaza's 2.2 million people.
Israel has also accused the United Nations of failing to act in a timely fashion, saying 700 truckloads of aid are idling inside Gaza. "It is time for them to pick it up and stop blaming Israel for the bottlenecks which are occurring," Israeli government spokesman David Mercer said on Wednesday.
The United Nations and aid groups trying to deliver food to Gaza say Israel, which controls everything that comes in and out, is choking delivery, and Israeli troops have shot hundreds of Palestinians dead close to aid collection points since May.
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