Eight Palestinians involved in delivering aid to the Gaza Strip were killed and 21 others were wounded while traveling to aid distribution sites on Wednesday, the organization they worked for said on Thursday.
It was the latest deadly setback for a contentious, Israeli-backed program that has taken over much of the relief effort in the territory, which has been criticized by the United Nations and has been plagued by chaos and violence since it began operations in late May.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the group helping to lead the effort, called on those holding the bodies of the killed workers to release them to their families for burial, without referring to a specific group or institution.
Earlier on Thursday, the organization said it held Hamas responsible for killing and wounding its workers. It did not clarify why it believed Hamas was responsible for the attack. But the foundation recently accused Hamas of threatening its workers. Hamas denied the claim and accused the foundation of lacking neutrality.
Since the new aid effort began operations in May, scores of hungry and desperate Palestinians have been killed or wounded on their way to collect boxes of food at aid distribution sites in Gaza operated by American security contractors. The Israeli military has said that its forces have fired “warning shots,” when people advance at its forces in what it has described as threatening manner.
Earlier on Wednesday, health officials and emergency workers in Gaza said several people had been killed and dozens of others injured in shootings in a central part of the enclave near where the foundation had set up a distribution site.
The sites were set up as a part of the Israeli-backed effort to deliver aid to Palestinians without benefiting Hamas. The effort has been boycotted by the United Nations and other prominent aid groups, which accuse Israel of weaponizing aid.
Israeli officials have argued that the new system is needed because Hamas is looting aid trucks entering parts of Gaza where it wields power, and hoarding supplies to support its own forces and maintain control of the population.
As the war nears the two-year mark, hardships faced by Palestinian civilians in Gaza have mounted. Internet and landline services were cut off in the enclave after key telecommunications infrastructure was damaged, according to the telecommunications ministry of the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“Every day, the struggles are becoming greater,” said Mohammed Fares, 24, a resident of Gaza City, adding that he walked a long distance on Thursday to gain internet access through an eSIM card. During blackouts, eSIM cards, which are a digitized SIM card embedded into the phone’s computer chip that can be activated with any cellular network’s service plan, have become a lifeline for Palestinians in Gaza.
The disruption, the ministry said, was undermining communications between people working in important roles in the health care and aid systems.
Israel has been conducting military operations on multiple other fronts since shortly after the war in Gaza began in October 2023.
Since the fall of the Assad dictatorship in Syria in December, Israeli security forces have bombed weapons caches in that country, taken over land in southern Syria and conducted operations to arrest people who they say are hostile to Israel.
On Thursday, the Israeli military said its soldiers entered Beit Jinn, a village southwest of the Syrian capital, Damascus, to detain Hamas militants who were planning attacks against Israelis.
The Syrian Interior Ministry said Israeli tanks, armored personnel carriers and infantry vehicles had raided Beit Jinn, and that Israeli forces had arrested seven citizens.
A civilian was killed by gunfire in the raid, the ministry said. The Israeli military said shots had been fired after a militant attempted to flee. It did not confirm the death.
Reporting was contributed by Ephrat Livni, Neil MacFarquhar, Reham Mourshed, Michael Crowley and David E. Sanger.
Adam Rasgon is a reporter for The Times in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.
Natan Odenheimer is a Times reporter in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.
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