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Hospitals in Gaza reported the killing of more than a dozen people, eight of them food-seekers, by Israeli fire on Saturday (August 2025) as Palestinians endured severe risks in their search for food amid airdrops and restrictions on overland aid delivery.

Near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site, Yahia Youssef, who had come to seek aid on Saturday (August 2025) morning, described a panicked scene now grimly familiar. After helping carry out three people wounded by gunshots, he said he looked around and saw many others lying on the ground bleeding.

“It’s the same daily episode,” Mr. Youssef said.

In response to questions about several eyewitness accounts of violence at the northernmost of the Israeli-backed American contractor’s four sites, the GHF media office said “nothing (happened) at or near our sites”.

UN: Over 1,300 killed in Gaza while trying to access food

“Worst-case scenario of famine”

The episode came a day after U.S. officials visited one site and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called GHF’s distribution “an incredible feat”. International outrage has mounted as the group’s efforts to deliver aid to hunger-stricken Gaza have been marred by violence and controversy.

“We weren’t close to them (the troops) and there was no threat,” Abed Salah, a man in his 30s who was among the crowds close to the GHF site near Netzarim corridor, said. “I escaped death miraculously.” The danger facing aid seekers in Gaza has compounded what international hunger experts this week called a “worst-case scenario of famine” in the besieged enclave. Israel’s nearly 22-month military offensive against Hamas has shattered security in the territory of some 2 million Palestinians and made it nearly impossible to deliver food safely to starving people.

Killing at aid distribution sites

From May 27 to July 31, 859 people were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites, according to a United Nations report published Thursday. Hundreds more have been killed along the routes of food convoys.

Israel and GHF have said they have only fired warning shots and that the toll has been exaggerated.

GHF says its armed contractors have only used pepper spray or fired warning shots to prevent deadly crowding. Israel’s military has said it has only fired warning shots at people who approach its forces, though on Friday said it was working to make the routes under its control safer.

Health officials reported that Israeli airstrikes and gunfire killed at least 18 Palestinians on Saturday (August 2, 2025), including three whose bodies were transported from the vicinity of a distribution site to a central Gaza hospital along with 36 others who were wounded.

Officials said 10 of Saturday’s casualties were killed by strikes in central and southern Gaza. Nasser Hospital said it received the bodies of five people killed in two separate strikes on tents sheltering displaced people. The dead include two brothers and a relative, who were killed when a strike hit their tent close to a main thoroughfare in Khan Younis.

The Gaza health ministry’s ambulance and emergency service said an Israeli strike hit a family house in an area between the towns of Zawaida and Deir al-Balah, killing two parents and their three children.

Another strike hit a tent close to the gate of a closed prison where the displaced have sheltered in Khan Younis, killing a mother and her daughter, they said.

The hospital said Israeli forces killed five other Palestinians who were among crowds awaiting aid near the newly constructed Morag corridor in Rafah and between Rafah and Khan Younis.

Israel’s military did not immediately respond to questions about the strikes or deaths near the aid sites.

Hostage families protest to end war

Meanwhile in Tel Aviv, families of Israeli hostages protested and urged Israel’s government to push harder for the release of their loved ones, including those shown in footage released by militant groups earlier this week.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff joined them a day after visiting Gaza and a week after walking away from ceasefire talks in Qatar, blaming Hamas’s intransigence and pledging to find other ways to free hostages and make Gaza safe.

Of the 251 hostages who were abducted when Hamas led an attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, around 20 are believed to be alive in Gaza. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the second-largest militant group in Gaza, released separate videos of individual hostages this week, triggering outrage among hostage families and Israeli society.

Israeli media hasn’t broadcast the videos, calling them propaganda, but the family of 21-year-old Rom Braslavski allowed for the release of a photograph showing him visibly emaciated in an unknown location.

After viewing the video, Tami Braslavski, his mother, blamed top Israeli officials and demanded they meet with her.

“They broke my child, I want him home now,” Braslavski told Ynet on Thursday. “Look at him: Thin, limp, crying. All his bones are out.” Hostage families and their supporters protesting in Tel Aviv called on Israel’s government to make a deal to end the war, imploring them to “stop this nightmare and bring them out of the tunnels”.

“Do the right thing and just do it now,” Lior Chorev ,the Hostages Family Forum’s Chief Strategy Officer said.

Airdrops expand despite limited impact

To circumvent restrictions on aid trucks crossing overland into Gaza, additional countries joined the Jordan-led coalition orchestrating parcels being dropped from the skies.

Alongside Israel, several European countries announced plans this week to join airdrop efforts, though most acknowledge the strategy is woefully insufficient.

“If there is political will to allow airdrops — which are highly costly, insufficient; inefficient, there should be similar political will to open the road crossings,” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, wrote on X on Saturday. “Let’s go back to what works; let us do our job.” The recent war on Gaza began when Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between militants and civilians and operates under the Hamas government.

The U.N. and other international organisations see it as the most reliable source of data on casualties.

Published – August 02, 2025 06:13 pm IST

TOPSHOT – This image grab from a handout video released by the Israeli army on February 29, 2024, shows what the army says are Gazans around aid trucks in Gaza City. Israeli forces shot dead 104 people when a crowd rushed towards aid trucks on February 29, the Health Ministry in Gaza said.
| Photo Credit: AFP PHOTO / Handout / Israeli Army

Israeli troops in the northern Gaza Strip opened fire on Palestinians scrambling for food aid on February 29, in a chaotic incident that the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory said killed more than 100 people.

There were conflicting reports about how the pre-dawn incident unfolded.

Also read | Gaza Health Ministry says war deaths exceed 30,000 as famine looms

The Israeli military said a “stampede” occurred when thousands of Gazans surrounded a convoy of 38 aid trucks, leading to dozens of deaths and injuries, including some people being run over.

An Israeli source said troops had opened fire on the crowd, believing it “posed a threat”.

The Gaza Health Ministry condemned the “massacre” in Gaza City, saying 112 people were killed and more than 750 wounded.

Reactions to the deaths have poured in from around the world.

U.S. ‘pressing for answers’

U.S. President Joe Biden said the incident would complicate delicate ceasefire negotiations in the almost five-month-old war, with the White House calling the deaths “tremendously alarming”.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the United States was “urgently seeking additional information on exactly what took place”.

Washington will be monitoring an upcoming investigation closely and “pressing for answers”, he said.

France says fire ‘unjustifiable’

France’s Foreign Ministry said “the fire by Israeli soldiers against civilians trying to access food is unjustifiable”.

The “tragic event” came as an “increasing and unbearable number of Palestinian civilians” were suffering from hunger and disease, it added, saying Israel must abide by international law and protect aid deliveries to civilians.

Writing on the social media platform X that Palestinian “civilians have been targeted by Israeli soldiers”, French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his “strongest condemnation” of the killings.

Turkey condemns ‘crime against humanity’

Turkey accused Israel of committing “another crime against humanity” and condemning Gazans to “famine” as civilians scavenge for dwindling supplies of food.

“The fact that Israel… this time targets innocent civilians in a queue for humanitarian aid, is evidence that [Israel] aims consciously and collectively to destroy the Palestinian people”, the Turkish foreign ministry said.

Colombia scraps Israel arms purchases

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro denounced what he called a “genocide” of the Palestinian people and suspended purchases of weapons from Israel, a key supplier of his country’s security forces.

“Asking for food, more than 100 Palestinians were killed by (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu. This is called genocide and recalls the Holocaust,” Petro wrote on X.

“The world must block Netanyahu.”

Also read | Rediscovering Palestinian statehood

Spain condemns ‘unacceptable’ incident

“The unacceptable nature of what happened in Gaza, with dozens of Palestinian civilians dead as they were waiting for food, underlines the urgency of a ceasefire,” Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares wrote on X.

Italy demands ‘immediate ceasefire’ –

Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza and urged Israel to protect the Palestinian population after the “tragic deaths”.

“We strongly urge Israel to protect the people in Gaza and to rigorously ascertain facts and responsibilities,” he said on X.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressed her “deep dismay and concern” over the violence.

U.N. condemnation

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the incident and was “appalled by the tragic human toll of the conflict”, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

“The desperate civilians in Gaza need urgent help, including those in the besieged north where the United Nations has not been able to deliver aid in more than a week,” Dujarric said.

EU decries ‘carnage’

European Union foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell denounced the deaths as “totally unacceptable”.

“I am horrified by news of yet another carnage among civilians in Gaza desperate for humanitarian aid,” he said on X.

Qatar denounces ‘heinous massacre’

Qatar’s foreign ministry condemned “in the strongest terms the heinous massacre committed by the Israeli occupation”, calling for “urgent international action” to halt the fighting in Gaza.

It went on to warn that Israel’s “disregard for Palestinian lives… will ultimately undermine international efforts aimed at implementing the two-state solution, and thus pave the way for the expansion of the cycle of violence in the region”.

Saudi calls for ceasefire

Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry condemned the deaths and reiterated “the need to reach an immediate ceasefire”.

It also renewed its “demands to the international community to take a firm position to oblige Israel to respect international humanitarian law, immediately open safe humanitarian corridors, allow the evacuation of the injured, and enable the delivery of relief aid”.

China shocked, condemns deaths

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Chinese Mao Ning said China was shocked by the incident and strongly condemned the killing of Palestinians during an aid delivery.

“China urges the relevant parties, especially Israel, to cease fire and end the fighting immediately, earnestly protect civilians’ safety, ensure that humanitarian aid can enter, and avoid an even more serious humanitarian disaster,” Mao said.

Australia ‘horrified’

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said her country was “horrified by today’s catastrophe in Gaza and the ongoing humanitarian crisis that has led to it”.

“These events underscore why for months Australia has been calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza,” she said.

“I have instructed my department to express Australia’s views directly to the Israeli ambassador.”