Israel turning Gaza into ‘graveyard of children and starving’: UNRWA chief

GENEVA: Nearly 800 people have died trying to access aid in Gaza since late May.

Israel is engineering a “cruel and Machiavellian scheme to kill” in Gaza, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees says, as the world body reports that since May, 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 in a post on X on Friday.

People in Gaza have “no way out”, he said. “Their choice is between 2 deaths: starvation or being [shot] at.”

Lazzarini was reacting to the Israeli military’s killing of 15 people, including nine children and four women, as they waited in line for nutritional supplements in the city of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza on Thursday.

His comments came on another bloody day in the Strip, with medical sources reporting that 45 people had been killed – 11 of them near a GHF-run aid centre in Rafah.

The controversial US- and Israel-backed GHF has effectively sidelined Gaza’s vast UN-led aid delivery network since it started operations in May, after Israel eased a more than two-month total blockade on the Strip.

Since then, 819 Palestinians have been killed while waiting for food, the spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Friday. He said 634 were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites – of which there are four for the entire enclave – and 185 were killed close to other humanitarian aid convoys, including some run by the UN.

The extent of the killing at the GHF sites emerged as Israel advanced its plans for what it calls a “humanitarian city” – likened by analysts to a concentration camp – to be built on the ruins of the southern city of Rafah.

Satellite images analysed by Al Jazeera show large tracts of land in Rafah being cleared of buildings, seemingly in preparation for the forced transfer of Palestinians.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz had told journalists this week that the zone would eventually house Gaza’s entire population of 2.1 million.

British Israeli analyst Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, noted that the three GHF aid hubs located in the south were an integral part of a plan to bait Palestinians into moving towards Rafah.

“The positioning of these GHF distribution sites is a premeditated part of a plan of social-demographic engineering to move Palestinians – to relocate, displace and kettle them – into this area in the south,” he told Al Jazeera.

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