Israeli military announces start of major ground offensive in Gaza
The Israeli military announced on Sunday that it had launched a major ground operation in the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli Defense Force said it is deploying ground troops, and has "eliminated" dozens of fighters of the Islamic group Hamas, and dismantled "infrastructure sites" of the group.
The Israeli Air Force also has been conducting intensive airstrikes across Gaza. Palestinian media reported that 17 Palestinians were killed on Monday in airstrikes on Khan Younis and other areas.
Footage of a hospital in Khan Younis taken by a crew from NHK's Gaza office early Monday shows many injured people being hauled to the hospital on trucks, and children receiving treatment there.
The air raids have claimed more than 100 lives on a daily basis. There appears to be no end to the rapid surge in the number of casualties.
Against this backdrop, the Israeli government announced on Sunday it will allow a basic amount of food to be brought into Gaza.
It has blocked humanitarian aid from being brought into the strip since early March. Gazans face an acute shortage of food and medicine.
It remains to be seen whether the food will reach the over 2 million Gazans in the enclave amid intensifying ground operations and airstrikes.
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Yomiuri Shimbun
20 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
36 Palestinians Killed Trying to Obtain Desperately Needed Aid in Gaza, Officials Say
The Associated Press Rital Abu Jari, 9, stands after receiving cream to relieve burns on her back and shoulder, which she suffered while trying to get warm donated food at a community kitchen in Gaza City, Tuesday, June 10, 2025. DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Palestinians desperately trying to access aid in Gaza came under fire again Tuesday, killing 36 people and wounding 207, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. Experts and humanitarian aid workers say Israel's blockade and 20-month military campaign have pushed Gaza to the brink of famine. At least 163 people have been killed and 1,495 wounded in a number of shootings near aid sites run by the Israeli and U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which are in military zones that are off-limits to independent media. The Israeli military has acknowledged firing warning shots on previous occasions at people who it says approached its forces in a suspicious manner. The foundation says there has been no violence in or around the distribution points themselves. But it has warned people to stay on designated access routes and it paused delivery last week while it held talks with the military on improving safety. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday there is 'meaningful progress' on a possible ceasefire deal that would also return some of the 55 hostages still being held in Gaza, but said it was 'too early to hope.' Foreign Minister Gideon Saar also mentioned Tuesday that there was progress in ceasefire negotiations. Netanyahu was meeting with the Israeli negotiating team and the defense minister Tuesday evening to discuss next steps. 'People are killed just trying to get food' In southern Gaza, at least eight people were killed while trying to obtain aid around Rafah, according to Nasser Hospital. In northern Gaza, two men and a child were killed and at least 130 were wounded on Tuesday, according to Nader Garghoun, a spokesperson for the al-Awda Hospital, which received the casualties. He said most were being treated for gunshot wounds. Witnesses told The Associated Press that Israeli forces opened fire at around 2 a.m., several hundred meters (yards) from the aid site in central Gaza. Crowds of Palestinians seeking desperately needed food often head to the sites hours before dawn, hoping to beat the crowds. The Israeli military said it fired warning shots at people it referred to as suspects. It said they had advanced toward its troops hundreds of meters (yards) from the aid site prior to its opening hours. Mohammed Abu Hussein, a resident of the nearby built-up Bureij refugee camp, said Israeli drones and tanks opened fire, and that he saw five people wounded by gunshots. Abed Haniyah, another witness, said Israeli forces opened fire 'indiscriminately' as thousands of people were attempting to reach the food site. 'What happens every day is humiliation,' he said. 'Every day, people are killed just trying to get food for their children.' Additionally, three Palestinian medics were killed in an Israeli strike Tuesday in Gaza City, according to the health ministry. The medics from the health ministry's emergency service were responding to an Israeli attack on a house in Jaffa street in Gaza City when a second strike hit the building, the ministry said. The Israeli military did not comment on the strike, but said over the past day the air force has hit dozens of targets belonging to Hamas' military infrastructure, including rocket launchers. The U.N. has rejected the new aid system Israel and the United States say they set up the new food distribution system to prevent Hamas from stealing humanitarian aid and using it to finance militant activities. The United Nations, which runs a long-standing system capable of delivering aid to all parts of Gaza, says there is no evidence of any systematic diversion. U.N. agencies and major aid groups have refused to cooperate with the new system, saying it violates humanitarian principles by allowing Israel to decide who receives aid and by forcing Palestinians to relocate to just three currently operational sites. The other two distribution sites are in the now mostly uninhabited southern city of Rafah, which Israel has transformed into a military zone. Israeli forces maintain an outer perimeter around all three hubs, and Palestinians must pass close to them to reach the distribution points. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken of creating a 'sterile zone' in Rafah free of Hamas and of moving the territory's entire population there. He has also said Israel will facilitate what he refers to as the voluntary emigration of much of Gaza's 2 million Palestinians to other countries — plans rejected by much of the international community, including the Palestinians, who view it as forcible expulsion. Hamas started the war with its attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took another 251 hostage. They still hold 55 hostages, fewer than half of them alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefire agreements or other deals. Israel's military campaign has killed nearly 55,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. It says women and children make up most of the dead, but doesn't distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel says it has killed more than 20,000 militants, without providing evidence. The war has destroyed vast areas of Gaza and displaced around 90% of its population, often multiple times.
Japan Times
a day ago
- Japan Times
Palestinians' dangerous ordeal to reach Israeli-approved aid
When university professor Nizam Salama made his way to a southern Gaza aid point last week, he came under fire twice, was crushed in a desperate crowd of hungry people and finally left empty handed. Shooting first started shortly after he left his family's tent at 3 a.m. on June 3 to join crowds on the coast road heading towards the aid site in the city of Rafah run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a new U.S.-based organization working with private military contractors to deliver aid in Gaza. The second time Salama came under fire was at Alam Roundabout close to the aid delivery site, where he saw six dead bodies. Twenty-seven people were killed that day by Israeli fire on aid seekers, Palestinian health authorities said. Israel said its forces had shot at a group of people they viewed as a threat and the military is investigating the incident. At the aid delivery site, known as SDS 1, queues snaked through narrow cage-like fences before gates were opened to an area surrounded by sand barriers where packages of supplies were left on tables and in boxes on the ground, according to undated CCTV video distributed by GHF. Salama said the rush of thousands of people once the gates opened was a "death trap." A boy crouches as Palestinians gather to collect what remains of relief supplies from the GHF distribution center in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on June 5. | REUTERS "Survival is for the stronger: people who are fitter and can make it earlier and can push harder to win the package," he said. "I felt my ribs going into each other. My chest was going into itself. My breath ... I couldn't breathe. People were shouting; they couldn't breathe at all." Reuters could not independently verify all the details of Salama's account. It matched the testimonies of two other aid seekers, who spoke of crawling and ducking as bullets rattled overhead on their way to or from the aid distribution sites. All three witnesses said they saw dead bodies on their journeys to and from the Rafah sites. A statement from a nearby Red Cross field hospital confirmed the number of dead from the attack near the aid site on June 3. Asked about the high number of deaths since it began operations on May 26, GHF said there had been no casualties at or in the close vicinity of its site. The Israeli military didn't respond to detailed requests for comment. Israeli military spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin told reporters on Sunday that Hamas was "doing its best" to provoke troops, who "shoot to stop the threat" in what he called a war zone in the vicinity of the aid sites. He said military investigations were underway "to see where we were wrong." Salama, 52, had heard enough about the new system to know it would be difficult to get aid, he said, but his five children — including two adults, two teenagers and a 9-year-old — needed food. They have been eating only lentils or pasta for months, he said, often only a single meal a day. Palestinian children hold pots and pans as they wait at a hot meal distribution point in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip. | AFP-Jiji "I was completely against going to the aid site of the American company (GHF) because I knew and I had heard how humiliating it is to do so, but I had no choice because of the bad need to feed my family," said the professor of education administration. In total, 127 Palestinians have been killed trying to get aid from GHF sites in almost daily shootings since distribution under the new system began two weeks ago, Gaza's health authority said on Monday. The system appears to violate core principles of humanitarian aid, said Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, a major humanitarian organization. He compared it to the Hunger Games, the dystopian novels that set people to run and fight to the death. "A few will be rewarded and the many will only risk their lives for nothing," Egeland said. "International humanitarian law has prescribed that aid in war zones should be provided by neutral intermediaries that can make sure that the most vulnerable will get the relief according to needs alone and not as part of a political or military strategy," he said. GHF did not directly respond to a question about its neutrality, replying that it had securely delivered enough aid for more than 11 million meals in two weeks. Gaza's population is around 2.1 million people. Famine risk Israel allowed limited U.N.-led aid operations to resume on May 19 after an 11-week blockade in the enclave, where experts a week earlier warned a famine looms. The U.N. has described the aid allowed into Gaza as "drop in the ocean." Separate to the U.N. operation, Israel allowed GHF to open four sites in Gaza, bypassing traditional aid groups. The GHF sites are overseen by a U.S. logistics company run by a former CIA official and part-owned by a Chicago-based private equity firm, with security provided by U.S. military veterans working for a private contractor, two sources have said. Gaza University professor Nizam Salama sits inside the tent where he and his family have taken refuge, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, on June 5. | REUTERS An Israeli defense official involved in humanitarian matters said GHF's distribution centers were sufficient for around 1.2 million people. Israel and the United States have urged the U.N. to work with GHF, which has seen a high churn of top personnel, although both countries deny funding it. Reuters has not been able to establish who provides the funding for the organization, but reported last week that Washington was considering an Israeli request to put in $500 million. GHF coordinates with the Israeli army for access, the foundation said, adding that it was looking to open more distribution points. It has paused then resumed deliveries several times after the shooting incidents, including on Monday. Last week, it urged the Israeli army to improve civilian safety beyond the perimeter of its operations. GHF said the U.N. was failing to deliver aid, pointing to a spate of recent lootings. Israel says the U.N.'s aid deliveries have previously been hijacked by Hamas to feed their own militants. Hamas has denied stealing aid and the U.N. denies its aid operations help Hamas. The U.N., which has handled previous aid deliveries into Gaza, says it has over 400 distribution points for aid in the territory. On Monday it described an increasingly anarchic situation of looting and has called on Israel to allow more of its trucks to move safely. Shooting starts Salama and four neighbors set out from Mawasi, in the Khan Younis area of the southern Gaza Strip, at 3 a.m. on Tuesday for the aid site, taking two hours to reach Rafah, which is several miles away near the Egyptian border. Shooting started early in their journey. Some fire was coming from the sea, he said, consistent with other accounts of the incidents. Israel's military controls the sea around Gaza. Mourners pray during the funeral of Palestinians killed, in what the Gaza health ministry say was Israeli fire near a distribution site in Rafah, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on June 3. | REUTERS His small group decided to press on. In the dark, the way was uneven and he repeatedly fell, he said. "I saw people carrying wounded persons and heading back with them towards Khan Younis," he said. By the time they reached Alam Roundabout in Rafah, about a kilometer from the site, there was a vast crowd. There was more shooting and he saw bullets hitting nearby. "You must duck and stay on the ground," he said, describing casualties with wounds to the head, chest and legs. He saw bodies nearby, including a woman, along with "many" injured people, he said. Another aid seeker interviewed by Reuters, who also walked to Rafah on June 3 in the early morning, described repeated gunfire during the journey. At one point, he and everyone around him crawled for a stretch of several hundred meters, fearing being shot. He saw a body with a wound to the head about 100 meters from the aid site, he said. The Red Cross Field Hospital in Rafah received a mass casualty influx of 184 patients on June 3, the majority of them injured by gunshots, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement, calling it the highest number of weapon-wounded patients the hospital had ever received in a single incident. There were 27 fatalities. "All responsive patients said they were trying to reach an assistance distribution site," the statement said. When Salama finally arrived at the aid point on June 3, there was nothing left. "Everyone was standing pulling cardboard boxes from the floor that were empty," he said. "Unfortunately I found nothing: a very, very, very big zero." Although the aid was gone, ever more people were arriving. "The flood of people pushes you to the front while I was trying to go back," he said. As he was pushed further toward where GHF guards were located, he saw them using pepper spray on the crowd, he said. GHF said it was not aware of the pepper spray incident but said its workers used nonlethal measures to protect civilians. "I started shouting at the top of my lungs, brothers I don't want anything, I just want to leave, I just want to leave the place," Salama said. "I left empty-handed ... I went back home depressed, sad and angry and hungry too," he said.
NHK
2 days ago
- NHK
Boat carrying Greta Thunberg and human rights group arrives in southern Israel
A boat carrying Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has arrived in southern Israel. Thunberg and a human rights group had been headed toward Gaza to deliver food and medicine, but were stopped by Israeli authorities on Monday. Israel's Foreign Ministry disclosed that night that the boat had docked at Ashdod Port. It said, "The passengers are currently undergoing medical examinations to ensure they are in good health." It released images showing Thunberg on a boat at the port flying the Israeli flag in the background. The ministry said, "Upon arrival, arrangements will be made for their return to their respective home countries." The operator of the boat Thunberg was on has criticized Israel's actions, saying, "We continue to demand the immediate release of all volunteers."
