Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Sunday that Israeli forces killed at least 86 Palestinians and wounded 365 over the previous 24-hour period as Israeli strikes continued to hit targets across the Strip and Israeli troops continued to gun down people seeking aid.
The Health Ministry said that the bodies of two Palestinians killed in previous Israeli attacks were recovered from the rubble. “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.
Among those killed were 18 people who were seeking aid, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed while attempting to get food since the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began operating at the end of May to 583. Another 4,186 aid seekers have been wounded.
The latest aid killings come after a report from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that Israeli troops are being ordered to fire on unarmed Palestinians attempting to reach GHF distribution sites to drive them away or disperse them, even though they pose no threat.
“It’s a killing field,” one soldier told Haaretz. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.”
According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, at least five Palestinians were killed and dozens more were wounded by IDF fire on Sunday afternoon while waiting for aid near the southern city of Rafah.
Israeli attacks on Sunday also included heavy strikes on northern Gaza after the Israeli military issued a new forced evacuation order in the area. Medical sources told Al Jazeera that more than 20 people were killed in northern Gaza on Sunday.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said the latest violence has brought the death toll since October 7, 2023, to 56,500 and the number of wounded to 133,419. Studies have shown that the Health Ministry’s numbers are a significant undercount, and estimates that factor in indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege and destruction of all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure bring the death toll into the hundreds of thousands.
