Israel shifts focus to Iran, while killings of Palestinians at aid sites continue ...Middle East

While Israel and the world have now shifted their focus to the conflict in Iran, the plight of Gaza remains in a perilous and dire situation.

The Israeli army said on Saturday that Iran has now become its primary military focus as both sides exchanged deadly missile strikes.

With world leaders now fearing the start of a new regional, and possibly world war, those same leaders and countries have seemingly forgotten about Gaza, the enclave now approaching two years of bombardment and destruction.

Israeli gunfire and strikes killed at least 140 people across the Gaza Strip in the last 24 hours, local health authorities said on Wednesday.

The deaths included the latest in near-daily killings of Palestinians seeking aid in the three weeks since Israel partially lifted a total blockade on Gaza that it had imposed for almost three months.

Medics said separate airstrikes on homes in the Maghazi refugee camp and Zeitoun neighbourhood in central and northern Gaza, respectively, killed at least 14 people. Five others were killed in an air strike on a tent encampment in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

As displaced Palestinians awaited trucks brought in by the United Nations along the Salahuddin road in central Gaza, 11 people were killed as Israeli troops opened fire at crowds, medics said.

Palestinians flock to the aid centre set up by the US and Israeli-led Gaza Humanitarian Relief Foundation on the Coastal Road in the Sudaniya area to receive a food package in northern Gaza City (Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it was investigating the reported deaths of people waiting for food. Regarding the other strikes, it said it was “operating to dismantle Hamas military capabilities” and taking “feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm”.

While Israel has said it is operating to eliminate Hamas, the risk of famine in an already devastated area remains high.

The IDF has said that Palestinians should not approach the aid sites between 6pm-6am local time, areas where looting by criminal gangs, militias and Hamas has made the situation even more dangerous.

Relatives of Palestinians, who lost their lives following the Israeli attack on people waiting in line for humanitarian aid (Photo: Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Prior to the end of the aid embargo, the World Health Organization, said the entire population of Gaza, 2.1 million people, faced prolonged food shortages with almost half a million facing a situation of hunger, acute malnutrition, starvation, illness and death.

On Tuesday, Gaza’s health ministry said 397 Palestinians have been killed and more than 3,000 wounded since aid deliveries restarted in late May.

‘People are being slaughtered day and night’

Some in Gaza expressed concern that the latest escalations in the war between Israel and Hamas would be overlooked as the focus moved to Israel’s five-day-old conflict with Iran.

“People are being slaughtered in Gaza, day and night, but attention has shifted to the Iran-Israel war. There is little news about Gaza these days,” said Adel, a resident of Gaza City.

“Whoever doesn’t die from Israeli bombs, dies from hunger. People risk their lives every day to get food, and they also get killed and their blood smears the sacks of flour they thought they had won,” he told Reuters via a chat app.

At least 51 Palestinians were killed and more than 200 wounded in the Gaza Strip while waiting for UN and commercial trucks to enter the territory on Tuesday, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry and a local hospital.

Israel has been channelling much of the now permitted aid into Gaza via a new US-Israeli backed group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which operates a handful of distribution sites in areas guarded by Israeli forces.

Gaza; aid under Israeli fire! pic.twitter.com/6gVJLwSocq

It has said it will continue to allow aid into Gaza while ensuring aid doesn’t get into the hands of Hamas. Hamas denies seizing aid, saying Israel uses hunger as a weapon against the population in Gaza.

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, called the current system for distributing aid “a disgrace & a stain on our collective consciousness”, in a post on X on Wednesday.

‘Aren’t we human beings?’

Palestinian witnesses told The Associated Press that Israeli forces carried out an airstrike on a nearby home before opening fire toward the crowd at an aid site in Khan Younis on Tuesday.

The Israeli military said soldiers had spotted a gathering near an aid truck that was stuck near where Israeli forces were operating. It acknowledged “several casualties” as Israelis opened fire on the approaching crowd and said authorities would investigate what happened.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs, or OCHA, said the people killed were waiting for food rations arriving in UN convoys.

The main Palestinian telecoms regulatory agency based in the West Bank city of Ramallah reported that Israeli strikes had cut off fixed-line phone service and internet access in central and southern Gaza.

Yousef Nofal, an eyewitness to the shooting in Khan Younis, said he saw many people motionless on the ground after Israeli forces opened fire. “It was a massacre,” he said, adding that the soldiers continued firing on people as they fled from the area.

Mohammed Abu Qeshfa reported hearing a loud explosion followed by heavy gunfire and tank shelling. “I survived by a miracle,” he said.

The dead and wounded were taken to the city’s Nasser Hospital, which confirmed 51 people had been killed. Medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières raised the death toll to 59, saying that another 200 had been wounded while trying to receive flour rations in Khan Younis.

Gaza. "Aid distribution", 2025. pic.twitter.com/wKIFPrvE0T

Samaher Meqdad was at the hospital looking for her two brothers and a nephew who had been in the crowd.

“Why did they fire at the young people? Why? Aren’t we human beings?” she said.

Palestinians say Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire on crowds trying to reach food distribution points run by the separate US and Israeli-backed aid group since the centres opened last month. Local health officials say scores have been killed and hundreds wounded.

In those instances, the Israeli military has acknowledged firing warning shots at people it said had approached its forces in a suspicious manner and has maintained that it is trying to eliminate Hamas operatives.

Deadly Israeli airstrikes continued elsewhere in the enclave on Tuesday. Al-Awda Hospital, a major medical centre in northern Gaza, reported that it has received the bodies of eight Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike on a house in the central Bureij refugee camp.

Israel says the new system operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is designed to prevent Hamas from siphoning off aid to fund its militant activities.

UN agencies and major aid groups deny there is any major diversion of aid and have rejected the new system, saying it can’t meet the mounting needs in Gaza and that it violates humanitarian principles by allowing Israel to control who has access to food and supplies.

Palestinians receive hot meals, distributed by charity organisations (Photo by Mahmoud ssa/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The UN-run network has delivered aid across Gaza throughout the 20-month Israel-Hamas war, but has faced major obstacles since Israel loosened a total blockade it had imposed from early March until mid-May.

UN officials say Israeli military restrictions, a breakdown of law and order, and widespread looting make it difficult to deliver the aid that Israel has allowed in.

Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for OCHA, said on Tuesday that the aid Israeli authorities have allowed into Gaza since late May has been “woefully insufficient”.

Palestinians receive hot meals, distributed by charity organisations, as people struggle with hunger due to ongoing Israeli attacks at Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on June 18, 2025. (Photo by Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Fuel has not entered Gaza for over 100 days, she said. “The only way to address it is by sufficient volumes and over sustained periods of time. A trickle of aid here, a trickle of aid there is not going to make a difference.”

Forgotten

Israel’s military campaign, launched in October 2023, has killed over 55,300 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Israel launched its campaign aiming to destroy Hamas after the group’s October 7, attack, in which militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took another 251 hostage.

The militants still hold 53 hostages, fewer than half of them alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefire agreements or other deals.

The assault has led to accusations of genocide and war crimes, which Israel denies.

Amid the continued conflict, Palestinians in Gaza have been closely following Israel’s with Iran, long a major supporter of Hamas.

“We are maybe happy to see Israel suffer from Iranian rockets, but at the end of the day, one more day in this war costs the lives of tens of innocent people,” said 47-year-old Shaban Abed, a father of five from northern Gaza.

“We just hope that a comprehensive solution could be reached to end the war in Gaza, too. We are being forgotten,” he said.

Additional reporting by Reuters and AP

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