Ten people, including six children, were killed in an Israeli air strike while waiting to fill water containers in central Gaza yesterday.
Their bodies were sent to Nuseirat’s al-Awda Hospital, which also treated 16 injured people including seven children, a doctor there said.
Eyewitnesses said a drone fired a missile at a crowd queuing with empty jerry cans next to a water tanker in al-Nuseirat refugee camp.
Footage shared online after the strike showed bloodied children and lifeless bodies, with screams of panic and desperation.
Residents rushed to the scene and transported the wounded using private vehicles and donkey carts.
The strike came as Israeli aerial attacks across the Gaza Strip escalated.
A spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defence Agency said 19 other Palestinians had been killed on Sunday, in three separate strikes on residential buildings in central Gaza and Gaza City.
Separately, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it had treated more mass casualty cases at its Rafah field hospital in southern Gaza in the last six weeks than in the 12 months before that.
It said that its field hospital in Rafah had received 132 patients ‘suffering from weapon-related injuries’ on Saturday, 31 of whom died.
The ‘overwhelming majority’ of the patients had gunshot wounds, it added, and ‘all responsive individuals’ reported they had been trying to access food distribution sites.
It said that the hospital had treated more than 3,400 weapon-wounded patients and recorded more than 250 deaths since new food distribution sites opened on 27 May – ‘exceeding all mass casualty cases treated at the hospital in the year prior’.
‘The alarming frequency and scale of these mass casualty incidents underscore the horrific conditions civilians in Gaza are enduring,’ the ICRC said.
On Saturday, southern Gaza’s Nasser hospital said 24 people were killed near an aid distribution site, where witnesses said Israeli troops had opened fire as people were trying to access food.
The UN human rights office said on Friday that it had so far recorded 789 aid-related killings.
It said that of those, 615 were in the vicinity of the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)’s sites, which opened on 27 May and are operated by US private security contractors inside military zones in southern and central Gaza.
The other 183 killings were recorded near UN and other aid convoys.
‘We wait at the water plant for at least four hours because production is so slow. Whatever we get, we hand out at displacement camps. As you know, they’re overwhelmed,’ Ahmed Abed said. ‘People line up for hours from dawn, but many leave empty-handed.’
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has called for United States President Donald Trump to face criminal prosecution for complicity in genocide for his support of the GHF aid distribution mechanism in Gaza.
In a statement, the Geneva-based organisation urged international bodies to hold Trump accountable for supporting the GHF in Gaza, which operates sites where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since they began operating at the end of May.
The monitoring group said testimony from the field indicated the involvement of private US security contractors and Israeli soldiers in the attacks on aid seekers.
It said Trump’s administration had also provided ‘an umbrella of comprehensive military, financial, political, and diplomatic support’ for Israel’s war in Gaza.
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