United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Friday that a US-backed aid operation in Gaza is “inherently unsafe,” giving a blunt assessment: “It is killing people.”
He also said UN-led humanitarian efforts are being “strangled,” aid workers themselves are starving and Israel — as the occupying power — is required to agree to and facilitate aid deliveries into and throughout the Palestinian enclave.
“People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence,” Guterres told reporters.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday rejected a report that the country’s military commanders ordered their soldiers to fire at Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid in Gaza. Left-leaning daily Haaretz 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. “The State of Israel absolutely rejects the contemptible blood libels that have been published in the Haaretz newspaper,” Netanyahu said in a joint statement with Defence Minister Israel Katz.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s civil defence agency said that Israeli forces killed at least 62 people on Friday, including 10 who were waiting for aid in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory. The reported killing of people seeking aid marks the latest in a string of deadly incidents near aid sites in Gaza, where a US- and Israeli-backed foundation has largely replaced established humanitarian organisations.
Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said that 62 Palestinians had been killed on Friday by Israeli strikes or fire across the Palestinian territory.
When asked for comment, the Israeli military said 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.
Bassal said that six people were killed in southern Gaza near one of the distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (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. — Reuters/AFP
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