GAZA CITY:
Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces on Tuesday killed more than 50 Palestinians near an aid centre in the territory’s south, the latest such incident amid severe shortages after more than 20 months of war.
Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that at least 53 people were killed and some 200 wounded as thousands of Palestinians gathered to receive flour at a World Central Kitchen (WCK) centre in the southern city of Khan Yunis.
“Israeli drones fired at the citizens. Some minutes later, Israeli tanks fired several shells at the citizens, which led to a large number of martyrs and wounded,” he said.
In Rafah, also in southern Gaza, the civil defence said four people were killed by Israeli fire, and two others by Israeli shelling near a hopstial in Gaza City in the north.
GHF said in a statement that its teams had distributed two million meals on Tuesday “without incident”, and nearly 28 million since it started operating.
At Gaza City’s Al-Ahli hospital, one of the last remaining functioning health facilities in the territory’s badly hit north, Amer Abu Safiya told AFP there was little doctors could do to treat a wound on his hand.
“Every day we are being bombed… Al-Ahli Hospital has been destroyed. Medical services are halted. As you can see, there’s nothing to wrap around my hand, and there’s no medication”, he said, holding up his swollen hand while laying down on a makeshift bed in the hospital’s backyard.
OCHA said its humanitarian partners in Gaza “continue to warn of the risk of famine in Gaza, amid catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity”.
The Palestinian Authority said internet and fixed-line communication services were down in central and south Gaza on Tuesday, following an attack on the territory’s main fibre optic cable it blamed on Israel.
It’s the third time in less than a week that internet was partly or fully down in Gaza due to damage on telecoms infrastructure.
