GAZA: Gaza's civil defence agency said on Saturday that five people were killed in an Israeli strike on a tent in Gaza City, all members of single family according to relatives. "Three children, their mother and her husband were sleeping inside a tent and were bombed by an (Israeli) occupation aircraft," family member Omar Abu al-Kass said. The strikes came "without warning and without having done anything wrong," added Abu al-Kass, who said he was the children's maternal grandfather. Images from the scene showed mourners, some of them weeping, gathering alongside five white shrouds of different sizes. "Five martyrs and wounded in an (Israeli) occupation air strike on a tent in the Sabra neighbourhood" of Gaza City, civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said.
The Israeli army, which resumed its offensive in Gaza on March 18 ending a two-month truce, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the strike. The war in Gaza was triggered by October 2023 attack, which killed 1,218 people on the Israeli side, according to official figures. Israeli retaliation has killed at least 52,787 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory's health ministry, which the United Nations considers reliable.
On Friday, Israel would not be involved in food distribution under a US-led plan for the Gaza Strip but would provide "necessary military security", Washington's ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said. Despite imposing a now two-month-long blockade of aid on Gaza, which it says is aimed at putting pressure on Palestinian militants Hamas, Israel has asserted there is no humanitarian crisis in the territory. "The Israelis are going to be involved in providing necessary military security, because it is a war zone, but they will not be involved in the distribution of the food, or even in the bringing of the food into Gaza," Huckabee told reporters in Tel Aviv. The US-led initiative, which the State Department said on Thursday would be led by a new foundation to distribute aid, has been met with international criticism as it appears to sideline the United Nations and existing aid organisations, and would overhaul current humanitarian structures in Gaza. Senior Hamas official Basem Naim said the plan risks "militarising aid".
Huckabee called upon the United Nations, "every NGO" and "every government" to take part. "We invite people who have been concerned about it to join in this process," he said, expressing hope that the plan could be put into action "very soon". In Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, crowds of Palestinians jostled for position, holding cooking pots, plastic bowls and serving dishes aloft in hopes of getting a hot meal at a distribution point before it closed over a lack of supplies. — AFP
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