UN officials say new Gaza aid system leads to mass killings

United Nations officials on Friday said a US- and Israeli-backed distribution system in Gaza was leading to mass killings of people seeking aid and urged Israel to let UN humanitarian supplies to the war-stricken territory resume.

Eyewitnesses and local officials have reported repeated killings of Palestinians seeking aid at distribution centres over recent weeks in the territory, where Israeli forces are battling Hamas militants.

The Israeli military has denied targeting people seeking aid and the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has denied any deadly incidents were linked to its sites.

But following weeks of reports, UN officials and other aid providers on Friday denounced what they said was a wave of killings of hungry people seeking aid.

"The new aid distribution system has become a killing field," with people "shot at while trying to access food for themselves and their families," said Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian affairs (UNWRA).

"This abomination must end through a return to humanitarian deliveries from the UN including @UNRWA," he wrote on X.

The health ministry in the Hamas-controlled territory says that since late May, more than 500 people have been killed near aid centres while seeking scarce supplies.

The country's civil defence agency has also repeatedly reported people being killed while seeking aid.

"People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families," said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

"The search for food must never be a death sentence."

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) branded the GHF relief effort "slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid".

Israel denies targeting civilians

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday rejected a newspaper report that the country's military commanders ordered their soldiers to fire at Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid in Gaza.

Left-leaning daily Haaretz had earlier quoted unnamed soldiers as saying commanders ordered troops to shoot at crowds near aid distribution centres to disperse them even when they posed no threat.

Haaretz said the military advocate general, the army's top legal authority, had instructed the military to investigate "suspected war crimes" at aid sites.

The Israeli military declined to comment to AFP on that claim.

Netanyahu said in a joint statement with Defence Minister Israel Katz that their country "absolutely rejects the contemptible blood libels" and "malicious falsehoods" in the Haaretz article.

The military said in a separate statement that it "did not instruct the forces to deliberately shoot at civilians, including those approaching the distribution centres".

It added that Israeli military "directives prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians."

Israel blocked deliveries of food and other crucial supplies into Gaza from March for more than two months.

It began allowing supplies to trickle in at the end of May, with GHF centres secured by armed US contractors and Israeli troops on the perimeter.

Guterres said that from the UN, just a "handful" of medical deliveries had cross into Gaza this week.

Civil defence says 65 killed

Gaza's civil defence agency told AFP that 65 Palestinians had been killed on Friday by Israeli strikes or fire across the Palestinian territory, including 10 who were waiting for aid.

The Israeli military told AFP it was looking into the incidents, and denied its troops fired in one of the locations in central Gaza where rescuers said one aid seeker was killed.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that six people were killed in southern Gaza near one of the distribution sites operated by GHF, and one more in a separate incident in the centre of the territory, where the army denied shooting "at all".

Another three people were killed by a strike while waiting for aid southwest of Gaza City, Bassal said.

Elsewhere, eight people were killed "after an Israeli air strike hit Osama Bin Zaid School, which was housing displaced persons" in northern Gaza.

MSF said that in the week of June 8, shortly after GHF opened a distribution site in central Gaza's Netzarim corridor, the MSF field hospital in nearby Deir el-Balah saw a 190 percent increase in bullet wound cases compared to the previous week.

Aitor Zabalgogeaskoa, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza, said in a statement that under the way in which the distribution centres currently operate: "If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot."

"If they arrive on time, but there is an overflow and they jump over the mounds and the wires, they get shot," he added.

"If they arrive late, they shouldn't be there because it is an 'evacuated zone', they get shot."

Militants attack Israeli forces

Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said they shelled an Israeli vehicle east of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza on Friday.

The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas-ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said they attacked Israeli soldiers in at least two other locations near Khan Yunis in coordination with the Al-Qassam Brigades.

Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

Israel's retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 56,331 people, also mostly civilians, according to Gaza's health ministry. The United Nations considers its figures reliable.