37 killed in Israeli raid near aid collection point in Gaza
Gaza
Israeli soldiers killed at least 37 people near a distribution centre for humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian medical sources on Saturday.
About 100 people were injured by Israeli army gunfire and shelling in the Khan Younis area in the south of the sealed-off coastal region, according to medical circles at the local Nasser Hospital.
They were transferred to the hospital from the al-Tina area in Khan Younis.
The medical source said that the death toll is expected to increase due to the seriousness of a large number of cases.
The Israeli army said it was investigating the incident, in response to a query.
The controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is currently responsible for the distribution of food in the Gaza Strip. Supported by Israel and the US, the foundation began its work at the end of May after a months-long Israeli blockade of aid deliveries.
But the UN has criticized the fact that the foundation operates too few distribution centres and that people there and on their way to them are exposed to extreme danger.
Hundreds of people have been killed near the distribution centres and around aid convoys since the end of May, according to the UN.
Mohammed Al-Khalidi, speaking to Reuters, pointed the finger at the Israeli army for the attack.
He said he was part of a group of Palestinians who had been told the GHF aid distribution centre was open, but when they arrived tanks began moving towards them and opened fire. 'It wasn't shots that were to scare us or to organize us, it was shots that were targeted to kill us, if they wanted to organize us they would have, but they meant to kill us.'
On 15 July, the UN human rights office said it had so far recorded 674 killings in the vicinity of the GHF's four sites in southern and central Gaza over the past six weeks. Another 201 killings had been recorded along routes of UN and other aid convoys, it added.
The UN also said this week that the number of acutely malnourished children has doubled since Israel began restricting food entering the territory in March. Despite the creation of the GHF significant amounts of aid, including baby formula, is still being blocked at the border.
On Friday, the director of one field hospital said in a statement that they had an unprecedented influx of patients suffering from severe exhaustion, emaciation and acute malnutrition. So far, 69 children have died from malnutrition during the increasing humanitarian crisis, according to the Hamas government media office.
On Friday, US President Donald Trump once again suggested a ceasefire deal was very near – but a Palestinian official told the BBC that talks remain blocked, with a latest troop withdrawal map proposed by Israel still unacceptable to Hamas.
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Al Jazeera
10 hours ago
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How RFK Jr's vaccine funding cuts fit with Trump's vision
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Al Jazeera
a day ago
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Trump and the global rise of fascist anti-psychiatry
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In a precedent that likely informs Trump's plan, Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, attacked psychiatric reformsas leftist indoctrination and defunded successful community mental health services, replacing them with coercive asylum and profit-based models, while advocating pseudoscience linked to evangelical movements. Bolsonaro claimed to defend family values and national identity against globalist medical ideologies, while sacrificing countless Brazilian lives via policies later characterised by the Senate as crimes against humanity. Bolsonaro's record is instructive for anticipating Trump's plans. Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Brazil's disgraced former president and their shared political ideologies. Bolsonaro's reversal of Brazil's internationally recognised psychiatric reform movement, which emphasised deinstitutionalisation, community-based psychosocial care and autonomy, inflicted profound harm. Under his rule, institutionalisation in coercive 'therapeutic communities', often operated by evangelical organisations, with little oversight, and similar to RFK Jr's proposed 'wellness farms', skyrocketed. Investigations revealed widespread abuses in these communities, including forced confinement, unpaid labour, religious indoctrination, denial of medication, and physical and psychological violence. Bolsonaro's government poured large sums into expanding these dystopian asylums while defunding community mental health centres, leaving people with severe mental illness and substance use disorders abandoned to punitive care or the streets. This needless suffering pushed more people into Brazil's overcrowded prisons, where psychiatric care is absent, abuse rampant and systemic racism overwhelming, with Black people accounting for more than 68 percent of the incarcerated population. Bolsonaro's psychiatric agenda enhanced carceral control under the guise of care, reproducing racist and eugenicist hierarchies of social worth under an anti-psychiatry banner of neo-fascist nationalism. Trump and Bolsonaro's reactionary approaches underline a crucial truth: Both psychiatry and critiques of it can serve very different ends, depending on the politics to which they are attached. Far-right politicians often use anti-psychiatry to justify privatisation, eugenics and incarceration. They draw on ideas from the libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who argued in the 1960s that mental illness was a 'myth', and called for the abolition of psychiatric institutions. In the US today, these political actors distort Szasz's ideas, ignoring his opposition to coercion, by gutting public mental health services under the guise of 'healthcare freedom'. This leaves vulnerable populations to suffer in isolation, at the hands of police or fellow citizens who feel increasingly empowered to publicly abuse, or even, as seen in the killing of Jordan Neely in New York City, execute them on subways, in prisons, or on the streets. By contrast, critics of psychiatry on the left demand rights to non-medical care, economic security and democratic participation. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, RD Laing and Ivan Illich advocated for deinstitutionalisation not to abandon people, but to replace coercion with community-led social care that supports rights to individual difference. Their critiques targeted not psychiatry itself, but its use by exploitative, homogenising political systems. To oppose reactionary anti-psychiatry, mental health professionals and politicians cannot simply defend the status quo of over-medicalisation, profit-driven care and the pathologisation of poverty. Millions justifiably feel betrayed by current psychiatric norms that offer little more than labels and pills while ignoring the political causes of their suffering. If the left does not harness this anger towards constructive change, the right will continue to exploit it. The solution is not to shield America's mental health systems from critique, but to insist on an expansive political vision of care that affirms the need for psychiatric support while refusing to treat it as a substitute for the political struggle for social services. This means investing in public housing, guaranteed income, peer-led community care worker programmes, non-police crisis teams and strong social safety nets that address the root causes of distress, addiction and disease. Mental health is fundamentally a political issue. It cannot be resolved with medications alone, nor, as Trump and RFK Jr are doing, by dismantling psychiatric services and replacing them with psychiatric coercion. The fight over mental health policy is a fight over the meaning of society and the survival of democratic ideals in an era where oligarchic power and fascist regimes are attempting to strangle them. Will we respond to suffering with solidarity, or with abandonment and punishment? Will we recognise the collective causes of distress and invest in systems of care, or allow political opportunists to exploit public disillusionment for authoritarian ends? These are the questions at stake, not just in the United States, but globally. If the psychiatric establishment refuses to support progressive transformation of mental health systems, we may soon lose them altogether as thinly disguised prisons rise in their place. If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide, these organisations may be able to help. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Qatar Tribune
2 days ago
- Qatar Tribune
Gaza aid distribution declared ‘orchestrated killing' by MSF
Agencies Doctors Without Borders, better known by its French-language acronym MSF, has called for the immediate end to Israel's militarised food distribution scheme in Gaza, which it described as 'institutionalised starvation and dehumanisation'. In a grim report released on Thursday, titled 'This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing', the medical nonprofit said that it operates clinics in Rafah, southern Gaza, near two GHF aid distribution sites under the control of the Israeli military and private US contractors. Since those sites opened in May, they have become synonymous with 'stampedes, suffocating crowd surges, violent looting and lethal 'crowd control' measures', MSF said in its reports. 'The GHF distribution sites fall dangerously short of any recognised standard for safe and dignified humanitarian distributions,' the report said. 'Nowhere else in the world where MSF operates – including in the most volatile conflict zones – would this level of violence around an 'aid distribution' site be tolerated. This must stop now,' the organisation said. MSF teams were 'mentally prepared for responding to conflict – but not to civilians killed and maimed while seeking aid', it said. MSF's primary care clinics have turned into mass casualty units since GHF took control of aid distribution in Gaza, it added. Over a seven-week period in June and July, MSF received 1,380 injured people and 28 dead bodies at its two primary care clinics in Gaza's al-Attar and al-Mawasi areas, which are close to two GHF distribution sites. The patients included 174 suffering from gunshot wounds, among them women and children, the report said, but most patients were young men and teenage boys. A significant number of patients from GHF sites in Khan Younis arrived with gunshot wounds to their lower limbs bearing a precision that 'strongly suggests intentional targeting of people within the distribution sites, rather than accidental or indiscriminate fire', MSF said. The report noted that many patients had also sustained injuries from 'crowd control' measures, including pepper spray and other kinds of physical assault. Patients injured at GHF sites typically arrived covered in sand and dust 'from time spent lying on the ground while taking cover from bullets', the report adds.
