Israel kills 26, including 14 near an aid distribution site: Gaza civil defense agency
Civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that eight people were killed by Israeli gunfire while waiting for aid near the south Gaza city of Khan Younis.
Six more people were killed and 21 injured by Israeli fire in central Gaza while waiting for food near a distribution center, according to Bassal.
The Israeli army told AFP it was looking into the incidents.
Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties in accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defense agency and other parties.
Thousands of Gazans gather daily near food distribution points across Gaza, including four belonging to the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Its operations have been marred by chaotic scenes and near-daily reports of Israeli forces firing on those waiting to collect rations.
Israeli restrictions on the entry of goods and aid into Gaza since the start of the war nearly 22 months ago have led to shortages of food and essential goods, including medicine, medical supplies and fuel, which hospitals rely on to power their generators.
Bassal said that five people were killed by a nightly air strike on a tent in Al-Mawasi in south Gaza, an area Israeli authorities designated as a safe zone early on in the war.
'It's said to be a green zone and it's safe, but it's not. They also say that the aid (distribution) is safe, but people die while obtaining aid,' said Adham Younes, who lost a relative in the strike.
'There's no safety within the Gaza Strip, everyone is exposed to death, everyone is subject to injury,' the 30-year-old told AFP.
Mahmud Younes, another Gazan who said he witnessed the strike, said: 'We found women screaming -- they were covered in blood. The entire family has been injured.'
Bassal of the civil defense agency said that six more people were killed in a strike near Gaza City, and one in a strike near the southern city of Khan Younis.
The Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas's armed wing and the largest armed force in Gaza, said in a statement Tuesday that they had bombarded an Israeli command-and-control center in south Gaza's Morag Axis, an Israeli-controlled corridor.
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Experts call for ‘healthocide' designation after surge in attacks on doctors, hospitals in war
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A young surgeon tries to save lives at a crippled Gaza hospital
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Its exhausted staff works around the clock to save lives.'It is so bad, no one can imagine,' said Salha, a 27-year-old neurosurgeon who, like countless doctors in Gaza, trained at Shifa after medical school and hopes to end his career the future is hard to think about when the present is all-consuming. Salha and other doctors are overwhelmed by a wartime caseload that shows no sign of easing. It has gotten more challenging in recent weeks as patients' bodies wither from rampant was initially part of a British military post when it opened in 1946. It developed over the years to boast Gaza's largest specialized surgery department, with over 21 operating rooms. Now, there are only three, and they barely Shifa's operating rooms are always full, surgeries are also performed in the emergency room, and some of the wounded must be turned away. Bombed-out buildings loom over a courtyard filled with patients and surrounded by mounds of fled northern Gaza at the start of the war — and only returned to Shifa at the beginning of this year. While working at another extremely busy hospital in central Gaza, he kept tabs on Shifa's worsening condition.'I had seen pictures,' he said. 'But when I first got back, I didn't want to enter.'A young doctor and a warAfter graduating from medical school in 2022, Salha spent a year training at Shifa. That is when he and a friend, Bilal, decided to specialize in everything changed on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and Israel's retaliatory campaign the first few weeks of the war, Salha was an intern at Shifa. Because Israel had cut off Gaza's Internet service, one of Salha's jobs was to bring scans to doctors around the complex. He had to navigate through thousands of displaced people sheltering there and run up and down stairwells when elevators stopped Israeli troops moved into northern Gaza, he and has family left. Bilal, who stayed in Gaza City, was killed a few months later, Salha long after Salha left, Israeli forces raided Shifa for the first time in November said the hospital served as a major Hamas command and control center. But it provided little evidence beyond a single tunnel with two small rooms under the made similar arguments when raiding and striking medical facilities across Gaza even as casualties from the war mounted. Israel says it makes every effort to deliver medical supplies and avoid harming international law, hospitals lose their protected status if they are used for military purposes. Hamas has denied using hospitals for military purposes, though its security personnel can often be seen inside them and they have placed parts of hospitals off limits to the forces returned to Shifa in March 2024, igniting two weeks of fighting in which the military said it killed some 200 militants who had regrouped hospital was left in ruins. The World Health Organization said three hospital buildings were extensively damaged and that its oxygen plant and most equipment were destroyed, including 14 baby all this was going on, Salha worked at a hospital in central Gaza, where he performed over 200 surgeries and procedures, including dozens of operations on fractured skulls. Some surgeons spend a lifetime without ever seeing he returned to Shifa as a neurosurgeon resident, the buildings he used to run between — some had been rehabilitated — felt haunted.'They destroyed all our memories,' he said.A shrunken hospital is stretched to its limitsShifa once had 700 beds. Today there are roughly 200, and nearly as many patients end up on mattresses on the floor, the hospital manager said. Some beds are set up in storage rooms, or in tents. An extra 100 beds, and an additional three surgery rooms, are rented out from a nearby hospital once employed 1,600 doctors and nurses. Now there about half as many, according to Shifa's administrative manager, Rami Mohana. With Gaza beset by extreme food insecurity, the hospital can no longer feed its staff, and many workers fled to help their families survive. Those who remain are rarely a recent morning, in a storage room-turned-patient ward, Salha checked up on Mosab Al-Dibs, a 14-year-old boy suffering from a severe head injury and malnutrition.'Look how bad things have gotten?' Salha said, pulling at Al-Dibs' frail mother, Shahinez, was despondent. 'We've known Shifa since we were kids, whoever goes to it will be cured,' she said. 'Now anyone who goes to it is lost. There's no medicine, no serums. It's a hospital in name only.'There are shortages of basic supplies, like gauze, so patients' bandages are changed infrequently. Gel foams that stop bleeding are three CT scan machines were destroyed during Israeli raids, Mohana said, so patients are sent to another nearby hospital if they need one. Israel has not approved replacing the CT scanners, he wait for hours — and sometimes days — as surgeons prioritize their caseload or as they arrange scans. Some patients have died while waiting, Salha months without a pneumatic surgical drill to cut through bones, Shifa finally got one. But the blades were missing, and spare parts were not available, Salha said.″So instead of 10 minutes, it could take over an hour just to cut the skull bones,' he said. 'It leaves us exhausted and endangers the life of the patient.'When asked by The Associated Press about equipment shortages at Shifa, the Israeli military agency in charge of aid coordination, COGAT, did not address the question. It said the military ''consistently and continuously enables the continued functioning of medical services through aid organizations and the international community.″Unforgettable momentsFrom his time at the hospital in central Gaza, Salha can't shake the memory of the woman in her 20s who arrived with a curable brain hemorrhage. The hospital wouldn't admit her because there were no beds available in the intensive care had wanted to take her in an ambulance to another hospital, but because of the danger of coming under Israeli attack, no technician would go with him to operate her ventilator.'I had to tell her family that we will have to leave her to die,' he stories have happier a girl bleeding from her head arrived at Shifa, Salha's colleague stopped it with his hand until a gel foam was secured. The girl, who had temporarily lost her vision, greeted Salha after her successful recovery.'Her vision was better than mine,' the bespectacled Salha said, breaking a smile.'Sometimes it seems we are living in a stupor. We deal with patients in our sleep and after a while, we wake up and ask: what just happened?'
