Israeli forces have killed at least 110 Palestinians in attacks across Gaza on Saturday, according to medical sources, including 34 people waiting for food rations at the United States-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in southern Rafah.
The killings on Saturday came as progress in ceasefire talks in Qatar stalled and condemnation grew of the Israeli plan to forcibly displace the enclave’s entire population.
In Rafah, survivors and witnesses said Israeli forces fired directly at Palestinians in the al-Shakoush area, in front of one of the GHF sites, which the United Nations and rights groups have slammed as “human slaughterhouses” and “death traps”.
Samir Shaat, who survived the attack, described “pools of blood” at the GHF site, and said the victims were being shrouded in the bags they had hoped to collect food in.
“The bag meant to be filled with food turned into shrouds. I swear to God it is nothing but a death trap,” he said, sitting next to the body of his friend at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. “They opened gunfire on people in a completely frenzied manner. As I carried my friend over my shoulder, I walked among martyrs.”
Mohammad Barbakh, a Palestinian father who also survived the attack, said the victims were killed by Israeli sniper fire.
“They deceive us, letting us come to receive aid. They let us carry the bags, then started shooting at us as if we were ducks being hunted,” he told the AFP news agency.
Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, said Israeli soldiers at the GHF site opened fire without warning.
“The GHF keeps only one aid centre operational in Rafah, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to move to the southern part of Gaza to get food aid,” Tareq said.
“Witnesses report that the Israeli military squarely targeted hungry crowds without prior warning, causing a great deal of panic and fear along with chaotic scenes that erupted following the shooting,” he added.
“The latest attack on aid seekers underscores how no place in Gaza is safe and no act of survival is spared from Israeli strikes.”
According to doctors in Gaza, more than 800 Palestinians have been killed and 5,000 others wounded at GHF sites since the group began its operations in late May.
“The vast majority were shot in the head and legs,” said Khalil al-Degran, a spokesperson for Al-Aqsa Hospital. “We are struggling to cope with the overwhelming number of casualties amid a devastating shortage of medical supplies.”
‘Extremely cruel’
Other Israeli attacks on Saturday included bombings that killed 14 Palestinians in Gaza City, four of them in a residence on Jaffa Street in the Tuffah area. That assault also wounded 10 others.
Israeli forces also hit two residential buildings in Jabalia in northern Gaza, killing 15 people, according to medical sources. Israeli strikes on the Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, killed seven more people.
Israeli forces also pounded Beit Hanoon in northern Gaza, dropping nearly 50 bombs on the northeastern part of the city.
The renewed attacks came as the Israeli military announced that its forces had attacked Gaza 250 times in the last 48 hours. The Israeli military has also continued to restrict the entry of food and other humanitarian supplies into Gaza despite warnings of famine from rights groups.
The Government Media Office in Gaza said on Saturday that 67 children have now died due to malnutrition. It said 650,000 children under the age of five were also at “real and immediate risk of acute malnutrition in the coming weeks”.
“Over the past three days, we have recorded dozens of deaths due to shortages of food and essential medical supplies, in an extremely cruel humanitarian situation,” the statement read.
“This shocking reality reflects the scale of the unprecedented humanitarian tragedy in Gaza.”
Progress in negotiations between Hamas and Israel to end the war have, meanwhile, stalled, the Reuters and AFP news agencies reported, with the sides disagreeing over the extent of Israeli forces’ withdrawal from Gaza.
A Palestinian source told Reuters that Hamas has objected to the withdrawal maps proposed by Israel, as they would leave about 40 percent of the territory under Israeli occupation, including all of Rafah and other territories in northern and eastern Gaza.
Two Israeli sources told Reuters that Hamas wanted Israel to retreat to lines it held in a previous ceasefire before it renewed its offensive in March.
A Palestinian source also told the AFP that the Israeli plan would force hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians into a small area near the city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt.
“Hamas’s delegation will not accept the Israeli maps… as they essentially legitimise the reoccupation of approximately half of the Gaza Strip and turn Gaza into isolated zones with no crossings or freedom of movement,” they said.
The agencies also reported that the two sides were divided on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and guarantees on ending the war. One Palestinian source told Reuters the crisis could be solved with more intervention from the US.
The indirect talks are expected to continue, despite the latest obstacles. Delegations from Israel and Hamas have been in Qatar since Sunday.
‘Engineered collapse of Palestinian society’
Omar Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, said Israel is unlikely to give in to pressure to reach a ceasefire quickly, because its goals in Gaza extend far beyond returning the captives held by Hamas there.
“It’s been clear since October 2023 that Israel’s ultimate goal here is the physical destruction of Gaza, the engineered collapse of Palestinian society there, and the forcible depopulation of the entirety of the Strip,” Rahman told Al Jazeera.
The world was seeing the continuation of that strategy, he said, whether 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”, or the plan announced by Israeli Minister of Defence Israel Katz to build a so-called “humanitarian city” to house 2.1 million Palestinians on the ruins of Rafah, which has been razed to the ground.
Rahman said that framing the proposal as a “humanitarian city” was farcical. “You strip away these euphemisms, and what you have there is a concentration camp,” he said.
“What Israel’s trying to do is create a concentration camp, which is essentially a holding cell until other options open up for it to depopulate that [area].”
Palestinians in Gaza have also rejected the plan and reiterated that they would not leave the enclave, while rights groups, international organisations and several nations have slammed it as laying the ground for “ethnic cleansing” or the forcible removal of a population from its homeland.
In Israel, political analyst Akiva Eldar told Al Jazeera that the majority of Israelis are “really appalled” by Katz’s plan, which would be “illegal and immoral”.
“Anybody who will participate in this disgusting project will be involved in war crimes,” Eldar said.
The message underlying the plan, he said, is that “there can’t be two people between the river and the sea, and those who deserve to have a state are only the Jewish people”.
Other analysts told Al Jazeera that the expulsion of Palestinians from their land and their concentration in restricted areas is nothing new.
Lorenzo Kamel, a Middle East professor at the University of Turin, noted that Saturday marks the day in 1948 when 70,000 Palestinians were expelled from the village of Lydda during what became known as the “march of death”.
“Many of them ended up in the Gaza Strip,” Kamel said. “This is not something new, but it has accelerated in the past months.”
The plan to gather the Gaza population on the ruins of Rafah is, therefore, “nothing but another camp in preparation for the deportation from the Gaza Strip”.
