One dead, 48 injured after forces open fire at Gaza aid hub
One person has been killed and another 48 were injured when forces opened fire on crowds of Palestinians over-running an aid distribution site, Gaza's health ministry has said.
People broke through the fences around the distribution site on Tuesday, and an Associated Press journalist heard Israeli tank and gunfire, and saw a military helicopter firing flares.
Earlier, UN official Ajith Sunghay had said 47 Palestinians were injured, mostly by gunfire, at the hub set up by an Israeli and US-backed foundation outside Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah.
It was not yet known whether the death and injuries were caused by Israeli forces, private contractors or others. The foundation said its military contractors had not fired on the crowd but 'fell back' before resuming aid operations. Israel said its troops nearby had fired warning shots.
Ghassan, 5, a boy that UNRWA met, was born with quadriplegia after oxygen deprivation at birth. His real suffering began when the war started in #Gaza.
Medicine and specialised care kept him stable at 13kg.Now he weighs just 5kg. He is in pain and starving.
The people of Gaza… pic.twitter.com/kDaeENy0W6
— UNRWA (@UNRWA) May 28, 2025
The distribution hub outside Rafah was opened the day before by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been slated by Israel to take over aid operations.
The UN and other humanitarian organisations have rejected the new system, saying it will not be able to meet the needs of Gaza's 2.3 million people and allows Israel to use food as a weapon to control the population.
They have also warned of the risk of friction between Israeli troops and people seeking supplies.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that 'there was some loss of control momentarily' at the distribution point, adding that 'happily, we brought it under control'.
He repeated that Israel plans to move Gaza's entire population to a 'sterile zone' at the southern end of the territory while troops fight Hamas elsewhere.
Palestinians have become desperate for food after nearly three months of Israeli blockade pushed Gaza to the brink of famine.
In a separate development, Israel said it had carried out air strikes on the international airport in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, after Iran-backed Houthi rebels fired several missiles at the country in recent days, without causing casualties.
The Israeli military said it destroyed aircraft used by the rebels.
Israel last struck the airport in Sanaa on May 6, destroying the airport's terminal and leaving its runway riddled with craters. Some flights resumed to Sanaa on May 17.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
31 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Iran blasts Trump for ‘racist mentality' and hostility to Muslims over travel ban
Tehran has denounced the US travel ban on Iranians and citizens of 11 other mostly Middle Eastern and African countries, saying Washington's decision was a sign of a 'racist mentality'. Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday reviving sweeping restrictions that echo the US president's first-term travel ban, justified on national security grounds after a firebomb attack at a pro-Israel rally in Colorado. Alireza Hashemi-Raja, the foreign ministry's director general for the affairs of Iranians abroad, called the measure – which takes effect on 9 June – 'a clear sign of the dominance of a supremacist and racist mentality among American policymakers'. The decision 'indicates the deep hostility of American decision-makers towards the Iranian and Muslim people', he added in a statement the ministry released on Saturday. Apart from Iran, the US ban targets nationals of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. A partial ban was imposed on travellers from seven other countries. Hashemi-Raja said the policy 'violates fundamental principles of international law' and deprives 'hundreds of millions of people of the right to travel based solely on their nationality or religion'. The foreign ministry official said the ban was discriminatory and would 'entail international responsibility for the US government', without elaborating. Iran and the US severed diplomatic ties shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and relations have remained deeply strained since. The US is home to the largest Iranian community outside Iran. According to figures from Tehran's foreign ministry, in 2020 there were about 1.5 million Iranians in the US. Trump's executive order came days after Sunday's attack at the Colorado rally, in which authorities said more than a dozen people were hurt. The suspect is an Egyptian man who had overstayed a tourist visa.
Reuters
3 hours ago
- Reuters
Iran says US travel ban shows 'deep hostility' for Iranians, Muslims
June 7 (Reuters) - Iran's foreign ministry said a U.S. travel ban that includes Iran showed "deep hostility of American decision-makers towards the Iranian people and Muslims", the ministry posted on the X platform on Saturday.
The National
3 hours ago
- The National
Owen Jones: The UK media has ignored this hugely revealing scandal
And yet Benjamin Netanyahu – the Israeli prime minister subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant – has been accused of forging this alliance by the Israeli political class. And yet – once again – the Westminster media has overwhelmingly failed to cover this latest profoundly revealing scandal. Avigdor Lieberman is a far-right opposition leader who once served as Netanyahu's deputy prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister. This week, he publicly announced: 'The Israeli government is giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons, identified with Islamic State, at the direction of the prime minister.' Did Netanyahu come out swinging, accusing his opponent of antisemitism, as he did when another opposition leader, former Israeli general Yair Golan, declared that Israel was killing babies as a hobby? READ MORE: Patrick Harvie: Increased UK defence spending only makes war more likely He did not. Instead, Netanyahu bragged that 'Israel is working to defeat Hamas in various ways, on the recommendation of all heads of the security establishment'. In a video message, he clarified that Israel had 'activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas', shamelessly calling it 'a good thing' which was saving the lives of Israeli soldiers. 'What's wrong with that?' We're talking here about a militia headed by a man named Yasser Abu Shabab. He styles his faction as the 'Anti Terror Service', but it is a criminal gang operating in an area of Rafah firmly under Israeli military control. His own family has not only disowned him, but backed his execution. According to Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada, his militia is composed of 300 'drug dealers and criminals.' And here's the important detail. To justify imposing a total siege on Gaza, Israel claimed that Hamas was stealing humanitarian food. Among those pointing out this wasn't true was Cindy McCain, widow of the late hawkish Republican senator John McCain, and now director of the World Food Programme. But we do know that Shabab's Israel-backed gang has been stealing aid. As ever with the Israeli authorities: every accusation is a confession. This is just another plank of Israel's starvation policy. But again, the Western media has overwhelmingly failed to clearly spell out what Israel is actually doing. Having imposed a total siege on Gaza since March 2, Israel set up a US-backed shadow entity named the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to explicitly supplant the UN. It hasn't just been rejected by every aid agency – even the US marine who heads it resigned on the basis it contradicted the basic principles of humanitarianism. The Foundation set three aid checkpoints in the south in an effort to concentrate Gaza's entire population into a confined area – a concentration camp. Too little aid was delivered, much of it unusable given the siege on cooking materials. But in any case, the Israeli military repeatedly fired on starving Palestinians. In the words of Tory MP Kit Malthouse, the UN system had been replaced with a 'shooting range, an abattoir'. But when the Israeli military massacred dozens of starving Palestinians, they deployed their usual strategy: deceive, deflect, deny, distort. Even though the shootings happened in an Israeli military zone, and despite the overwhelming evidence of Israeli lies, the Western media indulged Israeli claims that Hamas was responsible as if they were credible. CNN belatedly published a clear rebuttal of Israeli lies, but attention had already moved on. As ever, the Western media overall fail to allow Israeli responsibility for atrocities to stick. And yet now, even as Yair Lapid – the main opposition leader – states Netanyahu is 'giving weapons to organisations close to ISIS in Gaza', this latest plank of Israel's starvation strategy barely gets any coverage. This is despite Israel's 'Hamas is ISIS' campaign long being used to justify the genocide. This all fits a classic pattern, of course. Israel encouraged the rise of Hamas in the 1980s in order to undermine its public enemy number one at the time, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. More recently, Netanyahu worked with Qatar to transfer money to prop up Hamas – with the hope of dividing the Palestinian nation and movement so an independent state was impossible. Remember too how the West armed and backed the Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, playing a crucial role in creating the global Islamist fundamentalist movement. You would think the Western media might take an interest given the precedents. It is true that there is a shift taking place. Israeli spokespeople are suddenly being taken apart on mainstream television. Sky News is demanding the Prime Minister answer if genocide is taking place. But the media narrative still has not clearly shifted to reality – that is, a crime of historic proportions is being facilitated by Western governments, which means questions should be focused on 'how can this crime be stopped, and perpetrators held to justice' rather than 'is Israel doing something very bad here?' The latter is an improvement on where the narrative was stuck for so long – which was essentially 'Israel is waging a war of self-defence', with a side debate about whether the 'response' was 'proportionate'. What is clear is that an understanding is creeping into the political and media elites that a reckoning is coming, where those who facilitated this abomination will be forced to answer for what they did and what they didn't do. Time is running out.
