Israeli forces killed at least 110 Palestinians in attacks across Gaza on Saturday, according to medical sources, including 34 people waiting for food rations in Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), supported by the United States, in southern Rafah.
The murders on Saturday came while progress in the cease-fire talks in Qatar stopped and the conviction has increased from the Israeli plan to force the entire population of the enclave.
In Rafah, the survivors and witnesses said that Israeli forces drew directly from the Palestinians in the Al-Shakoush region, before one of the GHF sites, which the United Nations and the rights defense groups criticized as “human slaughterhouses” and “death traps”.
Samir Shaat, who survived the attack, described “blood pools” on the GHF site, and said that the victims were wrapped in the bags in which they hoped to collect food.
“The bag intended to be filled with food transformed into camelores. I swear to God that it is nothing other than a death trap,” he said, sitting next to his friend’s body at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. “They opened gunshots on people in a completely frantic way. While I was carrying my friend over my shoulder, I was walking among the martyrs. ”
Mohammad Barbakh, a Palestinian father who also survived the attack, said that the victims had been killed by a shot of Israeli elite shooters.
“They deceive us, letting us come to receive help. They let us carry the bags, then started to shoot us as if we were ducks chased,” he told the AFP news agency.
Tareq Abu Azzoum of Tel Aviv Tribune, reporting from Deir El-Balah, in the center of Gaza, said that Israeli soldiers of the GHF site opened fire without warning.
“The GHF has only one operational aid center in Rafah, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to move to the southern part of Gaza to obtain food aid,” said Tareq.
“Witnesses report that the Israeli army has completely targeted hungry crowds without prior warning, causing a lot of panic and fear with chaotic scenes that broke out after the shooting,” he added.
“The last attack on assistance seekers underlines how no place in Gaza is safe and no act of survival is spared Israeli strikes.”
According to doctors from Gaza, more than 800 Palestinians were killed and 5,000 others injured on GHF sites since the start of its operations in late May.
“The vast majority have been shot in the head and legs,” said Khalil Al-Degran, spokesperson for Al-Aqsa Hospital. “We have trouble dealing with the crushing number of victims in the middle of a devastating shortage of medical supplies.”
‘Extremely cruel’
On Saturday, other Israeli attacks included bomb attacks which killed 14 Palestinians in Gaza City, including four in a residence on rue Jaffa in the Tuffah region. This assault also injured 10 others.
Israeli forces also struck two residential buildings in Jabalia in northern Gaza, killing 15 people, according to medical sources. The Israeli strikes on the SHATI refugee camp, west of Gaza City, killed seven other people.
Israeli forces also struck Beit Hanoon in northern Gaza, dropping nearly 50 bombs on the northeast part of the city.
The renewed attacks have occurred while the Israeli army announced that its forces have attacked Gaza 250 times in the last 48 hours. The Israeli army has also continued to restrict the entry of food and other humanitarian supplies to Gaza despite warnings from the famine of rights defense groups.
The government’s media office in Gaza said on Saturday that 67 children were now died due to malnutrition. He said that 650,000 children under the age of five were also “real and immediate risk of acute malnutrition in the coming weeks”.
“Over the past three days, we have recorded dozens of deaths due to essentials of food and essential medical supplies, in an extremely cruel humanitarian situation,” the statement said.
“This shocking reality reflects the extent of the unprecedented humanitarian tragedy in Gaza.”
Progress in negotiations between Hamas and Israel to end the war have blocked the agencies of Reuters and AFP, the parties in disagreement on the extent of the withdrawal of the Israeli Gaza forces.
A Palestinian source told Reuters that Hamas had opposed the withdrawal cards proposed by Israel, because they would leave around 40% of the territory under Israeli occupation, including all Rafahs and other territories in the North and East of Gaza.
Two Israeli sources told Reuters that Hamas wanted Israel to retire to the lines he held in a previous ceasefire before renewing his offensive in March.
A Palestinian source also told AFP that the Israeli plan would force hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in a small area near the city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt.
“The delegation of Hamas will not accept Israeli cards … because they essentially legitimize the reappearance of about half of the Gaza strip and transform Gaza into isolated areas without level passages or freedom of movement,” they said.
The agencies also indicated that the two parties were divided on the entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza and guarantee the end of the war. A Palestinian source told Reuters that the crisis could be resolved with more intervention by the United States.
Indirect talks should continue, despite the last obstacles. The delegations of Israel and Hamas have been in Qatar since Sunday.
“ Collapse designed of Palestinian society ”
Omar Rahman, a Middle East Council scholarship holder on World Affairs, said ISRAEL probably did not go to pressure to reach a ceasefire quickly, because his objectives in Gaza extend far beyond the return of the captives held by Hamas there.
“It has been clear since October 2023 that Israel’s ultimate objective here is the physical destruction of Gaza, the designed collapse of Palestinian society there and the forced depopulation of the entire strip,” Rahman told Tel Aviv Tribune.
The World was seeing the continuation of that strategy, he Said, where through the ghf, which has been “Concocted by the Americans and the Israelis to Displace the Normal Lines of Aid Distribution and then Corral the Surviving Population Into very concentrated parts of the Gaza Strip” Minister of Defense Israel Katz to Build A So-Called “Humanitarian City” to house 2.1 million Palestinians on the Ruins of Rafah, which was shaved on the ground.
Rahman said that framing the proposal as a “humanitarian city” was easy. “You delete these euphemisms, and what you have there is a concentration camp,” he said.
“What Israel is trying to do is create a concentration camp, which is essentially a maintenance cell until other options open to depopulate this (zone).”
The Palestinians of Gaza also rejected the plan and reiterated that they would not leave the enclave, while the rights defense groups, international organizations and several nations slammed it by throwing the ground for “ethnic cleaning” or the forced abolition of a population of its homeland.
In Israel, political analyst Akiva Eldar told Tel Aviv Tribune that the majority of Israelis were “really dismayed” by the plan of Katz, which would be “illegal and immoral”.
“Whoever participates in this disgusting project will be involved in war crimes,” said Elder.
The message underlying the plan, he said, is that “there can be two people between the river and the sea, and those who deserve to have a state are only the Jewish people”.
Other analysts have told Tel Aviv Tribune that the expulsion of the Palestinians of their land and their concentration in limited areas was not new.
Lorenzo Kamel, a professor in the Middle East at the University of Turin, noted that Saturday marked on the day of 1948, when 70,000 Palestinians were expelled from the village of Lydda during what became the “death march”.
“Many of them ended up in the Gaza Strip,” said Kamel. “It’s not something new, but it has accelerated in recent months.”
The plan to bring together the population of Gaza on the ruins of Rafah is therefore “nothing but another camp in preparation for the expulsion of the Gaza Strip”.