Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Monday that Israeli forces killed 51 Palestinians and wounded 503 over the previous 24-hour period as Israeli strikes continue to pound targets across the Strip and Israeli troops are gunning down people seeking aid.
The Health Ministry’s numbers account for the dead and wounded Palestinians brought to hospitals. “There are still a number of victims under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported Israeli strikes and shelling in northern, southern, and central Gaza, and said the majority of the casualties were women and children. In Jabalia, northern Gaza, a strike on a home killed at least 16 people.
The Health Ministry also said that 75 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid in the six days that the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has been operating distribution sites inside the Strip.
On Monday, three Palestinians were killed and at least 35 wounded when Israeli forces opened fire near an aid distribution site in Rafah. A day earlier, 31 were reported killed near a Rafah distribution site in an early morning massacre.
Israel has denied it was responsible for killing the aid seekers on Sunday, although an IDF spokesman later admitted that Israeli troops fired at “suspects” in the area. Eyewitnesses, medics, and hospital staff who treated the wounded all reported that Israeli forces were responsible for the mass killing.
The international charity Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said that its teams “joined the mass casualty response in Nasser hospital, Khan Younis. Patients told MSF they were shot from all sides by drones, helicopters, boats, tanks, and Israeli soldiers on the ground.”
Claire Manera, MSF’s emergency coordinator, said the massacre has shown “once again that this new system of aid delivery is dehumanizing, dangerous, and severely ineffective.” Aid groups have been calling for Israel to allow aid to be brought into Gaza through already-established channels.
“Humanitarian aid must be provided only by humanitarian organizations who have the competence and determination to do it safely and effectively,” Manera said.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Monday that since Israel resumed its genocidal war on March 18, at least 4,201 Palestinians have been killed, and 12,652 were injured. The numbers account for dead and wounded Palestinians brought to hospitals and morgues.
Since October 7, 2023, the ministry’s death toll has reached 54,470, and the number of wounded has climbed to 124,693, figures that don’t account for thousands missing and presumed dead under the rubble or indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege.
