Israeli strikes kill 34 in Gaza after some aid restrictions eased
Alongside the measures, military operations continued.
Israel had no immediate comment about the latest strikes, which occurred outside the declared time frame for the pause between 10am and 8pm.
Humanitarian aid is airdropped to Palestinians over Gaza City (Jehad Alshrafi/AP)
Aid agencies welcomed the new measures but say they are insufficient. Images of emaciated children have sparked global outrage. Most of Gaza's population now relies on aid and accessing food has become increasingly dangerous.
Fourteen Palestinians have died of malnutrition-related causes in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, the territory's Health Ministry said on Monday.
They include two children, bringing the total deaths among children from causes related to malnutrition in Gaza to 88 since the war started on October 7, 2023, the ministry said In a statement.
The ministry said 59 Palestinian adults also have died of malnutrition-related causes across Gaza since the start of July, when it began counting deaths among adults.
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Daily Mail
3 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Extraordinary satellite images show huge crowds descending on aid trucks as UN claims Gaza is ‘on the brink of full-scale famine' amid mounting blame game
New satellite images show masses of starving Palestinians rushing to American-backed aid distribution point to pick up food and water. Photos taken by PlanetLabs shows innumerable Gazans gathering just over a kilometre away from a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid site in Khan Younis, Gaza's second city. They can be seen crowding around roughly 15 aid trucks that have been let into Gaza by Israel, as the Strip is entering a 'worst-case scenario' famine the world's main nutrition monitor warned. Rival aid efforts have sparked a war of words, pitting Israel, the US and the GHF against the UN, international aid groups and dozens of governments from around the world. Some have accused Israel of deliberately starving Gaza's civilian population. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative (IPC) said that air drops over Gaza will not be enough to avert the 'humanitarian catastrophe.' 'The worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in the Gaza Strip,' said the UN-backed group of organisations, used as a monitor to gauge malnutrition. 'Immediate, unimpeded' humanitarian access into Gaza was the only way to stop rapidly rising 'starvation and death', it said. The IPC issued their warning 'alert' after days of aid groups sounding the alarm over hunger-related deaths in Gaza. Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza on March 2 after ceasefire talks broke down. In late May, it began allowing a small trickle of aid to resume, amid warnings of a wave of starvation. The IPC said its latest data shows that 'famine thresholds' have been reached in 'most of the Gaza Strip'. Hunger-related deaths of young children, it said, were rising fast. 'Over 20,000 children have been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July, with more than 3,000 severely malnourished.' Children under the age of five were dying of hunger, 'with at least 16 reported deaths since 17 July', IPC said. 'Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths,' it said Tuesday. Israel and the US accuse Hamas of stealing aid - which they deny - and the UN of failing to prevent it. The US says it has not seen evidence of mass aid diversion in Gaza by Hamas. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and no starvation per se. Donald Trump diverged from Mr Netanyahu's comments on Monday, insisting there is 'real starvation' in Gaza. Asked if he agreed with Mr Netanyahu that it was a 'bold-faced lie' to say Israel was fuelling hunger, he said: 'I don't children look very real starvation stuff.' On Monday night, Mr Netanyahu's office said that Israel would work with aid groups, the US and Europe to ensure 'large amounts of humanitarian aid flows' into Gaza. Israel said that 120 aid trucks had entered Gaza from crossings on Sunday, and that Jordan and the UAE had airdropped 28 packages of food. The GHF said it had delivered more than 95 million meals directly to Palestinians in Gaza in total. But on Monday, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said a further 14 people had died from malnutrition over the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 147 since the start of the war, according to the ministry. It added today that more than 60,000 people have been killed since the war started. Israel has said that Hamas is using a so-called 'famine narrative' for leverage in ceasefire talks, which broke down last week as the US and Israel left talks in Doha, suggesting a cynical 'lack of desire to reach a ceasefire' from Hamas. Hamas responded with incredulity and insisted it did want to continue negotiations. Hamas leader Khalil Al-Hayya then said on Monday there was 'no point in continuing negotiations' under current conditions. A source close to Hamas told CNN: 'After the Israeli side withdrew from the negotiations, Hamas is considering reversing the flexibility it had shown regarding the timeline for releasing the 10 living Israelis captives.' Until talks resume, Gaza's 2.1 million population remains in dire need of aid. A former British soldier in Gaza shared chaotic and unsettling scenes of civilians rushing to collect aid from a distribution site as essentials continued to trickle into the beleaguered Palestinian enclave. Andrew Fox, a former British Army airborne officer, shared a series of clips from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) site in Rafah, describing an 'influx of hungry Gazans coming to get their aid'. The video was shared on social media in the early hours of Tuesday morning, after Israel said on Sunday it would halt military operations for 10 hours a day in parts of the Gaza Strip and allow new aid corridors. Mr Fox's dispatch from Rafah offers a rare insight into the coordination of aid deliveries in the Gaza Strip. Journalists are pushing to be allowed in and out of the enclave and say reporting from the enclave is nearing 'extinction' with local reporters facing 'threat of starvation'. 'The flow of people just keeps coming,' Mr Fox said, reporting from the sidelines of the crowd in the first few minutes of opening. The initial influx was mostly young men, he said, who were ordered to dismount from motorbikes to avoid injuries. Within 20 minutes, he said, they were starting to see more women and children arrive to claim essentials held in reserve. After 45 minutes, the aid had mostly been depleted. Mr Fox said the team had used smoke and flashbang grenades to 'encourage the last of the male crowd out of the site' to allow the team to hand out aid held in reserve for women and children. Mr Fox described GHF cardboard boxes, which he said were enough to buy one kilogram (2.2lbs) of flour in the barter economy. Increasingly, he said, Palestinians were taking empty boxes and wooden pallets to be used as firewood, with Gaza facing blackouts. 'No live rounds at all have been fired,' he said. Women and young people could be seen leaving the site with aid, waving and gesturing towards the camera. The GHF, a US-backed private aid operation supported by Israel, has faced pressure in recent days after the UN reported that Israeli forces had killed more than 1,000 Palestinians seeking food aid, mostly near distribution points. Israel accused Hamas of instigating chaos near the aid sites. It said its troops had only fired warning shots, and that they do not deliberately shoot civilians. The GHF has accused Hamas of massive aid theft in defending its distribution model. An internal US government analysis found no evidence of systematic theft of US-funded humanitarian supplies by Hamas, challenging the rationale Israel and the US give for backing the aid operation, as reported by Reuters last week. Mr Fox described the challenging environment facing locals as they waited to start distributing aid in Rafah. 'The terrain here is as destroyed as has been reported in the media. It's no lie. The place is wrecked. These people do need food. They do need feeding. They need the aid that these teams are bringing to them. 'This is really, really hot. There is water on site but people are still struggling for the very basics of life, and GHF are here to try and at least alleviate some of that suffering.' He wrote in a July 24 blog that while aid was entering Gaza, 'the grim truth is that supply is not the same as access'. 'Gaza's crisis is mainly a result of distribution collapse and governance issues, worsened by Hamas's tactics and the paralysis of traditional aid channels.' In testimonies shared with MailOnline, International Rescue Committee (IRC) staff inside Gaza described harrowing scenes. 'People are collapsing in the streets from emaciation... I saw a child digging through a pile of trash for food. He found nothing,' said IRC staffer Abdelraheem Hamad. 'The sound of children crying from hunger never stops. Every day, people knock on our doors asking for food. Not money — just bread,' said staffer Rania Al Shrehi. The leading international authority on food crises said in a new alert Tuesday that the 'worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip', predicting 'widespread death' without immediate action. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, said Gaza has teetered on the brink of famine for two years, but recent developments have 'dramatically worsened' the situation, including 'increasingly stringent blockades' by Israel. The IPC is a global initiative that partners with 21 aid groups, international organizations, and UN agencies, and assesses the extent of hunger suffered by a population. The alert, still short of a formal famine declaration, follows an outcry over images of emaciated children in Gaza and reports of dozens of hunger-related deaths after nearly 22 months of war. While international pressure led Israel over the weekend to announce measures to deliver more aid, the United Nations and Palestinians on the ground say little has changed, and desperate crowds continue to overwhelm and unload delivery trucks before they can reach their destinations. 'Formal famine declarations always lag reality,' David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee aid group, said in a statement ahead of the IPC alert. 'By the time that famine was declared in Somalia in 2011, 250,000 people - half of them children under 5 - had already died of hunger. By the time famine is declared, it will already be too late,' he said. 'In the coming days, thousands of Gaza's children will either be rescued — or allowed to die. That is the choice before us.' The conflict between Israel and Gaza continued as aid agencies scrambled to deliver essentials. The sun sets over Gaza, ravaged by war, as seen from the Israeli side of the border, July 28 Gaza's civil defence said Tuesday that Israeli air strikes killed at least 30 Palestinians, including women and children, in the central Nuseirat district. Civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Basal said the strikes were carried out overnight and into the morning and 'targeted a number of citizens' homes' in the Nuseirat refugee camp. The war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas killed 1,200 people in southern Israel and took some 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
What will it take to stave off famine in Gaza?
GENEVA, July 29 (Reuters) - A global hunger monitor said on Tuesday that a famine scenario was unfolding in the Gaza Strip, with malnutrition soaring, children under five dying of hunger-related causes and humanitarian access severely restricted. We examine what needs to be done to reverse the crisis. Israel said on Sunday it would halt military operations for 10 hours a day in parts of Gaza and designate secure routes for convoys delivering food and medicine between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, says 500-600 trucks a day are needed to prevent more of the 2.1 million population people starving. Since the announcement, over 100 truckloads of aid have been transported into Gaza, according to the U.N. The World Food Program said that only half of the 100 trucks it hoped to get in daily had been allowed in, and it had not been able to reopen the lifeline bakeries and community kitchens that closed in May due to shortages. More than 20,000 children were admitted to hospital with severe malnutrition between April and mid-July, according to the hunger monitor, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). The U.N. children's charity UNICEF is focusing on urgent delivery of Ready-To-Use-Therapeutic-Foods, including dense peanut paste and high-energy biscuits, which the acutely malnourished require before they can start eating normal food. Babies under six months need a therapeutic formula that works similarly to the paste. UNICEF says these special foods are set to run out by mid-August. Malnourished children often suffer complications that require antibiotics - something else that the WHO says is running out. Acutely malnourished children can usually recover within 8-10 weeks, experts say. For children under 2, who may have been malnourished during critical brain development, full recovery is harder to achieve. In all cases, long-term access to nutritious foods such as fruit, vegetables and meat is essential for full recovery, requiring commercial supplies to resume, UNICEF says. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private U.S.- and Israeli-backed group, said it has distributed over 96 million meals since late May, in boxes of staples such as rice, flour, pasta, tuna, beans, biscuits and cooking oil. However, most of these need to be cooked, and the IPC report noted that clean water and fuel are largely unavailable in Gaza. Israel says it will allow airdrops of food, and Jordan and the United Arab Emirates parachuted 25 tons into Gaza on Sunday. Yet it is widely acknowledged that the only effective way to meet Gaza's needs is by truck. Airdrops are many times more expensive and UNICEF notes they feed the first to arrive, not those in most need. Ways must be found to get aid safely to the right recipients. U.N. data gathered between May 19, when Israel lifted its blockade, and July 25 shows that only about one in eight of the 2,010 truckloads of relief collected from crossing points under the U.N.-led aid operation reached its destination. The rest were looted, "either peacefully by hungry people or forcefully by armed actors during transit". An internal U.S. government analysis found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies, and the U.N. refuses to cooperate with GHF, Israel's chosen aid provider. But deliveries by the GHF have, if anything, been more dangerous. The U.N. estimates that Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 people seeking food supplies, most of them near the militarised distribution sites of the GHF, which employs a U.S. logistics firm run by a former CIA officer and armed U.S. veterans. GHF denies that there have been deadly incidents at its sites, and says the deadliest have been near other aid convoys. The Israeli military has acknowledged that civilians have been harmed by its gunfire near distribution centres, and says its forces have now received better instructions.
Glasgow Times
3 hours ago
- Glasgow Times
Number of Palestinians killed in Israel-Hamas war passes 60,000, ministry says
The ministry, part of the Hamas-run government, said the death toll has climbed to 60,034, with another 145,870 people wounded since the Hamas attack on October 7 2023. It did not say how many were civilians or militants, but has said women and children make up around half of the dead. The ministry is staffed by medical professionals. The United Nations and other independent experts view its figures as the most reliable count of casualties. An Israeli armoured personnel carrier returns from inside the northern Gaza Strip (Ariel Schalit/AP) Israel's offensive has destroyed vast areas of Gaza, displaced around 90% of the population and caused a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, with experts warning of famine. As international organisations warn of a 'worst-case scenario of famine', Israel continued to strike the Gaza Strip, killing at least 70 Palestinians in the past day, according to local hospitals. More than half were killed while attempting to access aid, hospitals said, and includes a rising toll from a deadly incident on Monday as people attempted to access aid from a truck convoy passing through the southern Gaza Strip. Local hospitals said they received the bodies of an additional 33 people who were killed by gunfire around an aid convoy in southern Gaza on Monday, bringing the total from the single incident to 58. The Israeli military did not comment on the shooting. Israel says it only targets militants and takes extraordinary measures to avoid harming civilians. It blames civilian deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in populated areas. The military said it targeted Hamas military infrastructure over the past day including rocket launchers, weapons storage facilities and tunnels. An additional seven Palestinians were killed while attempting to access aid near the American and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) site in central Gaza, according to local hospitals. Neither GHF nor the Israeli military commented on the shooting, but the Israeli military has said in the past it only fires warning shots if troops feel threatened and GHF has said their contractors have not fired at civilians. Humanitarian aid is airdropped to Palestinians over Gaza City (Jehad Alshrafi/AP) Air strikes also targeted tents hosting displaced people in the central city of Nuseirat, killing 30 people, including 12 children and 14 women, according to Al-Awda hospital. The strikes come as international organisations continue to warn about the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, which has teetered on the brink of famine for two years. Recent developments have 'dramatically worsened' the situation, according to a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the attack that sparked the war, and abducted another 251. They are still holding 50 captives, around 20 believed to be alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefires or other deals. The war took a major turn in early March when Israel imposed a blockade, barring the entry of all food, medicine, fuel and other goods. Weeks later, Israel ended a ceasefire with a surprise bombardment and began seizing large areas of Gaza, measures it said were aimed at pressuring Hamas to release more hostages. At least 8,867 Palestinians have been killed since then. Israel eased the blockade in May, but UN agencies say it has not allowed nearly enough aid to enter and that they have struggled to deliver it because of Israeli restrictions and the breakdown of law and order. An alternative Israeli-backed system run by an American contractor has been marred by violence and controversy.
