“The gunfire was indiscriminate,” said Mohamed Abed, a father of two from the Bureij refugee camp. On Sunday, August 24, 2025, he was in a crowd of Palestinians walking toward a food distribution point south of Gaza City when Israeli troops opened fire.
Four people were killed, according to Al-Awda Hospital and two eyewitnesses who spoke to The Associated Press. The shooting happened in the Netzarim corridor area, hundreds of meters from a site run by the Israeli-backed American contractor Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF. Many in the crowd fled. Some fell after being hit.
Abed and another aid seeker, Aymed Sayyad, said soldiers fired when people near the front surged toward the distribution site before its scheduled opening. Sayyad said he and others helped two wounded men, one shot in the shoulder and the other in the leg.
The Israeli military and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A pattern around the aid sites
The United Nations says that since GHF began operating nearly three months earlier, hundreds of Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli troops and foreign military contractors at or near its sites. Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry says more than 2,000 Palestinians have died and more than 13,500 have been wounded while seeking aid, whether at distribution points or on routes used by UN and other aid convoys. The UN and independent experts consider the ministry the most reliable source on casualties in the war. Israel disputes its figures but has not published its own.
On Sunday the ministry put the war’s toll at at least 62,686 Palestinians. It also reported that malnutrition-related deaths had risen by eight to 289, among them a child, bringing the number of children who have died that way to 115.
Famine and a planned offensive
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the leading authority on food crises, said on Friday that famine is under way in Gaza City and could reach Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis by the end of the following month. Israel has disputed the finding, saying “there is no famine in Gaza.”
UNICEF’s executive director, Russell, called the famine “shocking,” but “not surprising.” “This did not happen because there were cyclones or, you know, droughts,” she said. “This happened because we could not get enough aid into these children.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat speaking from Jordan, called Israel’s blockade “a shameful black mark on humanity.” She said Israel had stopped trucks of one aid program from entering, and added: “Prime Minister Netanyahu is the point at which obstruction is happening.”
In the north, Israel’s military has said it is intensifying operations and mobilizing tens of thousands of reservists ahead of an offensive to take Gaza City. Residents of Jabaliya described heavy explosions overnight. Schoolteacher Salim Dhaher, who fled west from the camp, said he saw weaponized robots planting explosives as troops advanced. He said the aim was “to destroy everything above the ground, and force the transfer.”
Sources
- Israeli forces kill 4 aid seekers near Gaza City, hospital and witnesses say
- Palestinians say local gunmen and Israeli forces opened fire near Gaza aid site
