79 Gazans killed waiting for food after Israeli troops open fire, medics say
The U.N. World Food Program said its 25-truck convoy was mobbed shortly after it passed through the Zikim border crossing from Israel into Gaza. 'Our convoy encountered massive crowds of hungry civilians which came under gunfire,' the agency said in a statement.
Israel's four-month blockade has left Gazans so bereft of basics like fuel that the bodies of victims from Sunday's mass shooting were often piled onto donkey carts, rather than ambulances, to reach al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 79 people were killed.
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that it had identified 'a gathering of thousands of Gazans' and fired 'warning shots' to 'remove an immediate threat' to troops. The military did not respond to further questions about the nature of the threat. It has issued similar statements after mass shootings of aid-seekers gathered near distribution sites run by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation over the past two months.
'The IDF is aware of the claim regarding casualties in the area, and the details of the incident are still being examined,' the army said. It added that the Gaza Health Ministry's death toll did not 'align' with its own information, but provided no alternative figures.
Israel's blockade and military operations have reduced Gaza's 2 million-strong population to near starvation. World Central Kitchen, a U.S.-based nonprofit, said Sunday that its teams had run out of ingredients to cook warm meals. The health ministry said 18 people had died of a lack of food in 24 hours.
'The Israeli Authorities are starving civilians in #Gaza,' the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees said in a post Sunday on X. 'Among them are 1 million children.'
On the Al-Jazeera news network, the voice of correspondent Anas al-Sharif cracked as he pointed viewers to an elderly woman who appeared to have fainted from exhaustion as the cameras rolled. 'People are falling down now in the streets of Gaza from extreme hunger,' he said.
Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for Gaza's civil defense force, announced he was going on hunger strike, saying in a video statement that what is happening in Gaza 'is not merely a crisis.'
'It is a documented crime being committed against an entire people,' he said, addressing world leaders. 'You hold the power to stop this crime. History will not forgive those who watch in silence or those who remain complicit.'
Reached by phone at al-Shifa Hospital, an eyewitness to the shootings in northern Gaza said she had seen Israeli troops open fire as crowds ran to the aid trucks. Rebhi al-Masri, 30, said her brother-in-law was badly wounded from being shot in the neck and chest. Another relative was shot in the pelvis, and her brother had gone missing in the chaos. 'I have no idea where he is,' she said. 'Everybody started running.'
Zaher al-Wahidi, a spokesman for the Gaza Health Ministry, said another nine people were shot near two other aid distribution points or convoys in other areas of the enclave on Sunday.
As of July 13, the U.N. had recorded 875 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food in recent months, 674 of whom were killed around Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites. More than 200 others were killed while seeking food 'on the routes of aid convoys or near aid convoys' run by the U.N. or its humanitarian partners, Thameen al-Kheetan, a spokesman, told reporters in Geneva.
The U.N. said Friday that Israel had declined to renew the visa for a top U.N. official in Gaza who had criticized the military's shooting of Palestinian aid-seekers. Jonathan Whittall, who heads the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories, had addressed the spiraling bloodshed in a news conference last month. 'What we are seeing is carnage,' he said. 'It's a death sentence for people just trying to survive.'
Israeli media reported Sunday that the Foreign Ministry had viewed the comments as 'biased.' A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to comment, and the Israeli mission to the U.N. in New York did not immediately respond.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Gizmodo
39 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
Men Born in the Summer Are More Likely to Be Depressed, Study Finds
There really might be something to the idea of summertime sadness, at least for boys. A study finds that men born in the summer are more vulnerable to developing depression than men born at other times of the year. Researchers at the Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, Canada, conducted the study, an international survey of adults. They found that men, but not women, were more likely to experience depression symptoms later in life if their birth occurred in the summer compared to other seasons. The findings suggest that mothers are exposed to important environmental risk factors that vary throughout the calendar year, the authors say, including levels of sunshine. Study author Mika Mokkonen was inspired to look into this topic by the kind of question you'd get making small talk at a party. 'The initial spark of the idea for this research arose when someone asked me if I believed in horoscopes. It got me wondering if there could potentially be a biological basis for them, in terms of how a person's birthday could be associated with physiological or mental features,' he told Gizmodo. Doctors have long known that seasonality can affect our current mental health—the clearest example being seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression that typically emerges during the winter months (summer SAD does exist, though). But there's only been limited research looking at a possible link between birth timing and mental health, according to Mokkonen. Mokkonen and his team conducted an online survey of 303 adults. Participants provided basic demographic information like age and answered two questionnaires commonly used to assess a person's level of anxiety and depression. After controlling for factors like age and income, the researchers found that summer-born men (specifically people whose biological sex was male) were noticeably more likely to report depression symptoms than men born anytime else. The team's findings were published Wednesday in the journal PLOS Mental Health. These sorts of studies can only show a correlation between any two things (seasonality at birth and depression in this case) and not decidedly prove that being born in the summer can shape men's mental health. The researchers also admit they only collected survey responses over a brief two-month period in early 2024, meaning they might not have been able to capture people's 'variations in depression and anxiety scores.' And while some of the participants did come from different countries, a substantial proportion were college students. It's fair to say this is far from a thorough or complete study. So clearly more research is needed to replicate and expand on this preliminary finding. There's also the unanswered and likely complex question of why being born in the summer could be specifically worse for men but not women. Seasonality has long played a role in affecting the survival of most species, Mokkonen noted. And while people today are generally more sheltered from the harshest elements of the outside world than our hunter-gatherer ancestors were, the changing aspects of the seasons might still be enough to subtly influence us as we're developing in the womb. 'I would say it is possibly related to the environmental conditions of the mother during pregnancy,' Mokkonen said. 'Consider conditions like temperature and sunlight—how do those conditions vary across the year?' The researchers plan to continue investigating how other maternal factors, including the mother's diet and circulating hormone levels, can affect the later health of their children. Mokkonen also points out that regardless of the season they were born in, a majority of the people in their study reported having at least some symptoms of anxiety (66%) and depression (84%). In other words, while the seasons may hold some sway over us, some things are unfortunately common across the board.
Fast Company
39 minutes ago
- Fast Company
No, you don't need to get 10,000 steps per day
The gospel according to fitness influencers: drink three liters of water per day, get a minimum of eight hours of sleep, and walk at least 10,000 steps per day. From the hot girl walk, to wearing weighted vests and arm weights on said walk, to those taking it one—or 5,000—steps further and marching up to 15,000 or even 25,000 steps a day, these once-simple strolls have morphed into full-blown social media trends. When did something as basic as going for a walk become so intimidating? While mostly sage advice, if you've been struggling to hit the gold standard of 10,000 steps a day (which roughly equates to five miles) or found yourself doing laps around the block to get those final few hundred under your belt, just know that unofficial target isn't actually based in science. The 10,000 steps-a-day walking target originated as a 1960s marketing slogan by Japanese company Yamasa to sell pedometers. It has since become accepted wisdom, promoted heavily by the online fitness community. That is until new scientific analysis in The Lancet Public Health officially confirmed that this aspirational goal, while by no means harmful, isn't the magic number it's promoted to be, and even thousands fewer steps a day could still yield big health rewards. The researchers analyzed data from more than 160,000 adults to examine how step counts were linked with the risk of developing a number of health conditions. They discovered the overall mortality for people walking 7,000 steps was 47% lower than for those who walked only 2,000. Walking this amount daily also reduced the risk of health problems including death from cardiovascular disease and cancer, as well as incidence of type 2 diabetes and dementia. But after 7,000 steps, as the step count increased, the payoff rate slowed. The overall mortality for people notching 10,000 steps was 48%—just a 1% increase from 7,000—compared with 2,000. Now, that's not to say you should give up on your 10,000-step goal, or worse, cut back on the steps you are already doing. Hitting 10,000 steps was found to be better than 7,000 for some health conditions, such as reducing the risk of depression. Also, those clocking in 12,000 steps a day saw their overall mortality drop 55% compared with 2,000. But pushing for a minimum of 5,000 to 7,000—a more practical target for those who are currently inactive—will make the biggest difference for the least amount of effort. While 10,000 may still be the gold standard, just know that you are still reaping the health benefits if you only make it to 9,999.
Forbes
40 minutes ago
- Forbes
Thousands Of Microplastics Floating In Your Home And Car Are Slowly Damaging Your Lungs: Study
While we live in the Plastics Age, and it may no longer be a huge surprise that we are constantly exposed to microplastics, a new study claims that we might be inhaling 100 times more microplastics in our own homes and cars than scientists had previously estimated. To be more specific, human beings might be inhaling around 68,000 microplastic particles that are not visible to the naked eye inside their homes and cars. Lead author Nadiia Yakovenko and team from the Université de Toulouse in France had collected 16 air samples from their apartments and cars. The researchers then measured the concentrations of microplastics present in each air sample, as well as the size of the microplastics. They particularly focused on microplastics that are less than 10 micrometers and more likely to penetrate deep into lung tissues compared to fine particulate matter that is bigger than 10 micrometers or visible to the naked eye. Studies have found that inhaled particles larger than 10 µm are more likely to get collected in the upper respiratory tract and automatically get cleared out of your airways. However, your respiratory system cannot filter out fine particulate matter smaller than 10 micrometers, and so, it can penetrate deeper into the lungs. Microplastics smaller than 10 micrometers are of particular concern because they could release toxic additives into your cardiovascular system along with other environmental pollutants that it might have absorbed while floating around in the air. Multiple studies have shown that microplastics could potentially disrupt your body's normal endocrine functions and might even increase the risk of various diseases like cancer. "Microplastic is a ubiquitous pollutant resulting from the global extensive human use of plastic materials since 1950 and the mismanagement of plastic waste. The term 'microplastic' refers to plastic particles between 1 µm and 5mm in size that come in a variety of shapes and polymer compositions," the authors explained in their study that was published in PLoS One on July 30. "Human inhalation of fine particulate microplastic 1–10 µm that penetrate deep lung tissue may contribute to causing lung tissue damage, inflammation, and associated diseases." "Over the past decade, microplastics have been detected in outdoor atmospheric aerosols and deposition, in various parts of the world, from urban and highly industrialized areas to remote mountainous regions, the marine boundary layer, and indoor environments. The ubiquitous presence of microplastics in the atmosphere raises many concerns about whether, and to what extent, we are inhaling microplastics from outdoor and indoor air, with the latter likely playing the most significant role in human exposure to microplastics through inhalation," they added. 'Recent studies have shown that the concentration of indoor suspended MPs is eight times higher than outdoors, and the concentration of indoor deposited microplastic dust is 30 times higher than outdoors. Given that people in developed nations spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, including 5% in cars, the potential for inhalation exposure to MPs in indoor environments is significantly higher and warrants attention.'
