Firing at crowd seeking aid: ‘Same daily episode!’ Gaza laments

Deir al-Balah: Hospitals in Gaza reported the killing of more than a dozen people, eight of them food-seekers, by Israeli fire on Saturday as Palestinians endured severe risks searching for food amid airdrops and restrictions on overland aid delivery, reports the Associated Press.

Near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site, Yahia Youssef, who had come to seek aid Saturday morning, described a panicked scene now grimly familiar. After helping carry out three people wounded by gunshots, he said he looked around and saw others lying on the ground, bleeding.

“It's the same daily episode,” Youssef said.

In response to questions about several eyewitness accounts of violence at the northernmost of the Israeli-backed American contractor's four facilities, GHF said “nothing (happened) at or near our sites.”

The episode came a day after US officials visited one site, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called the distribution “an incredible feat.” International outrage has mounted as the group's efforts to deliver aid to hunger-stricken Gaza have been marred by violence and controversy.

“We weren't close to them (the troops) and there was no threat,” Abed Salah, a man in his 30s who was among the crowds close to the GHF site near Netzarim corridor, said.

“I escaped death miraculously,” he said.

The danger facing aid seekers in Gaza has compounded what international hunger experts this week called a “worst-case scenario of famine” in the besieged enclave. Israel's nearly 22-month military offensive against Hamas has shattered security in the territory of some 2 million Palestinians and made it nearly impossible to deliver food safely to starving people.

Seven Palestinians died of malnutrition-related causes in the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, the territory's health ministry said on Saturday.