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Gaza’s civil defence agency says Israeli forces opened fire on crowds of Palestinians trying to collect humanitarian aid in the war-torn Palestinian territory, killing 93 people and wounding dozens more.

Eighty were killed as truckloads of aid arrived in the north on Sunday, while nine others were reported shot near an aid point close to Rafah in the south, where dozens of people lost their lives just 24 hours earlier.

Four were killed near another aid site in Khan Yunis, also in the south, agency spokesman Mahmud Basal told AFP.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said its 25-truck convoy carrying food aid “encountered massive crowds of hungry civilians which came under gunfire” near Gaza City, soon after it crossed from Israel and cleared checkpoints.

Israel’s military disputed the death toll and said soldiers had fired warning shots “to remove an immediate threat posed to them” as thousands gathered near Gaza City.

Deaths of civilians seeking aid have become a regular occurrence in Gaza, with the authorities blaming Israeli fire as crowds facing chronic shortages of food and other essentials flock in huge numbers to aid centres.

The UN said this month that nearly 800 aid-seekers had been killed since late May, including on the routes of aid convoys.

Like ‘hunting animals’

In Gaza City, Qasem Abu Khater, 36, told AFP he had rushed to try to get a bag of flour but instead found a desperate crowd of thousands and “deadly overcrowding and pushing”.

“The tanks were firing shells randomly at us and Israeli sniper soldiers were shooting as if they were hunting animals in a forest,” he said.

“Dozens of people were martyred right before my eyes and no one could save anyone.”

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The WFP condemned violence against civilians seeking aid as “completely unacceptable”.

Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify tolls and details provided by the agency and other parties.

The army says it works to avoid harm to civilians and that this month it issued new instructions to its troops on the ground “following lessons learned” from a spate of similar incidents.

Israel on Sunday withdrew the residency permit of head of the UN OCHA (United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs) office in Israel, Jonathan Whittall, who has repeatedly condemned the humanitarian conditions in Gaza.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, in a post to X, accused him of spreading lies about the war in Gaza.

Papal call

The war was sparked by Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, leading to the deaths of 1219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed 58,895 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.

Separately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday expressed his regret to Pope Leo XIV after what he described as a “stray” munition killed three people sheltering at the Holy Family Church in Gaza City.

At the end of the Angelus prayer on Sunday, the Pope slammed the “barbarity” of the Gaza war and called for peace, days after the Israeli strike on the territory’s only Catholic church.

The strike was part of the “ongoing military attacks against the civilian population and places of worship in Gaza”, he said.

The Catholic Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, held mass at the Gaza church on Sunday after travelling to the devastated territory in a rare visit on Friday.

‘Expanding’ operations

Most of Gaza’s population of more than two million people have been displaced at least once during the war and there have been repeated evacuation calls across large parts of the coastal enclave.

On Sunday morning, the Israeli military told residents and displaced Palestinians sheltering in the Deir el-Balah area to move south immediately because of imminent operations in the area.

Whole families were seen carrying what few belongings they have on packed donkey carts heading south.

“They threw leaflets at us and we don’t know where we are going and we don’t have shelter or anything,” one man told AFP.

The displacement order was “another devastating blow to the already fragile lifelines keeping people alive across the Gaza Strip”, the UN OCHA said on Sunday.

According to the aid agency, 87.8% of Gaza is now under displacement orders or within Israeli militarised zones, leaving “2.1 million civilians squeezed into a fragmented 12% of the Strip, where essential services have collapsed”.

The army’s latest announcement prompted concern from families of hostages held since October 7, 2023, that the Israeli offensive could harm their loved ones.

Delegations from Israel and militant group Hamas have spent the past two weeks in indirect talks on a proposed 60-day ceasefire in Gaza and the release of 10 living hostages.

Of the 251 hostages taken during Hamas’ 2023 attack, 49 are still being held in Gaza, including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.

– Agence France-Presse