At least 79 Palestinians have been killed since dawn in Israeli attacks across Gaza, with dozens of children dying from malnutrition during Israel’s punishing months-long blockade, as ceasefire talks reportedly stall.
Among the victims on Saturday, 14 were killed in Gaza City, four of them in an Israeli strike on a residence on Jaffa Street in the Tuffah area, which injured 10 others.
At least 30 aid seekers were killed by Israeli army fire north of Rafah, southern Gaza, near the one operating GHF site, which rights groups and the United Nations have slammed as “human slaughterhouses” and “death traps”.
According to Al Jazeera Mubasher, Israeli forces fired directly at Palestinians in front of the aid distribution centre in the al-Shakoush area of Rafah.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said the Israeli army opened fire indiscriminately on a large crowd during one of the attacks.
“Many desperate families in the north have been making dangerous journeys all the way to the south to reach the only operating distribution centre in Rafah,” he said.
“Many of the bodies are still on the ground,” Mahmoud said, adding that those who were wounded in the attack have been transferred to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
Amid relentless daily carnage rained upon starving aid seekers and the ongoing Israeli blockade, Gaza’s Government Media Office said 67 children have now died due to malnutrition, and 650,000 children under the age of five are 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,” the statement added.
Israel is engineering a “cruel and Machiavellian scheme to kill” in Gaza, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Friday, as the world body reported that since May, when GHF began its operations, some 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid.
“Under our watch, Gaza has become the graveyard of children [and] starving people,” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said.
Mass displacement, expulsion ‘illegal and immoral’
As the Israeli military announced on Saturday that its forces attacked Gaza 250 times in the last 48 hours, Israeli officials have continued to push a plan to forcibly displace and eventually expel Palestinians.
Earlier this week, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced a plan to build a so-called “humanitarian city” which will house 2.1 million Palestinians on the rubble of parts of the city of Rafah, which has been razed to the ground.
But Palestinians in Gaza have rejected the plan and reiterated that they would not leave the enclave. Rights groups, international organisations and several nations have slammed it as laying the ground for “ethnic cleansing”, the forcible removal of a population from its homeland.
Israeli political analyst Akiva Eldar told Al Jazeera on Saturday 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,” Elder 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.”
As Israel announces its intention to force the population of Gaza into Rafah, Middle East professor at the University of Turin, Lorenzo Kamel, told Al Jazeera that the expulsion of Palestinians from their land and their concentration in restricted areas is nothing new.
In 1948, 77 years ago to this day, 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, adding that the Israeli authorities have been forcing Palestinians into spaces similar to concentration camps for decades.
“This is not something new, but it has accelerated in the past months,” he said. 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”.
Ceasefire talks hang in the balance
Negotiations taking place in Qatar to cement a truce are stalling over the extent of Israeli forces’ withdrawal from the Strip, according to Palestinian and Israeli sources familiar with the matter, the Reuters news agency reported on Saturday.
The indirect talks are expected to continue, despite the latest obstacles in clinching a deal based on a US proposal for a 60-day ceasefire.
A Palestinian source said Hamas has not accepted the withdrawal maps which Israel has proposed, as they would leave about 40 percent of the territory under Israeli occupation, including all of Rafah and further territories in northern and eastern Gaza.
Matters regarding the full and free flow of aid to a starving population, and guarantees, were also presenting a challenge.
Two Israeli sources said Hamas wants Israel to retreat to lines it held in a previous ceasefire, before it renewed its offensive in March.
Delegations from Israel and Hamas have been in Qatar since Sunday in a renewed push for an agreement.
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