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GAZA CITY: Gaza’s civil defense agency said that Israeli forces killed at least 62 people on Friday, including 10 who were waiting for aid in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

The reported killing of people seeking aid marks the latest in a string of deadly incidents near aid sites in Gaza, where a US- and Israeli-backed foundation has largely replaced established humanitarian organizations.
Civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said that 62 Palestinians had been killed on Friday by Israeli strikes or fire across the Palestinian territory.
When asked for comment, the Israeli military said it was looking into the incidents, and denied its troops fired in one of the locations in central Gaza where rescuers said one aid seeker was killed.

People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence.

Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general

Bassal said that six people were killed in southern Gaza near one of the distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and one more in a separate incident in the center of the territory, where the army denied shooting “at all.”
Another three people were killed by a strike while waiting for aid southwest of Gaza City, Bassal said.
The Health Ministry in the territory says that since late May, more than 500 people have been killed near aid centers while seeking scarce supplies.
GHF has denied that fatal shootings have occurred in the immediate vicinity of its aid points.
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders, or MSF on Friday slammed the GHF relief effort, calling it “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”
It noted that in the week of June 8, shortly after GHF opened a distribution site in central Gaza’s Netzarim corridor, the MSF field hospital in nearby Deir Al-Balah saw a 190 percent increase in bullet wound cases compared to the previous week.
Aitor Zabalgogeaskoa, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza, said in a statement that, under how the distribution centers currently operate: “If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot.”
“If they arrive on time, but there is an overflow and they jump over the mounds and the wires, they get shot.”
“If they arrive late, they shouldn’t be there because it is an ‘evacuated zone’, they get shot,” he added.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the US-backed aid operation in Gaza is “inherently unsafe,” giving a blunt assessment: “It is killing people.”
He also said UN-led humanitarian efforts are being “strangled,” aid workers themselves are starving and Israel — as the occupying power — is required to agree to and facilitate aid deliveries into and throughout the Palestinian enclave.
“People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence,” Guterres said.
Meanwhile, Bassal said that 10 people were killed in five separate Israeli strikes near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, east of which he said “continuous Israeli artillery shelling” was reported on Friday.
Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said they shelled an Israeli vehicle east of Khan Younis on Friday.
The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said they had attacked a group of Israeli soldiers north of Khan Younis in coordination with the Al-Qassam Brigades.
Bassal added that 30 people were killed in six separate strikes in northern Gaza on Friday, including a fisherman who was targeted “by Israeli warships.”
He specified that eight of them were killed “after an Israeli airstrike hit Osama Bin Zaid School, which was housing displaced people” in northern Gaza.
In central Gaza’s Al-Bureij refugee camp, 12 people were killed in two separate Israeli strikes, Bassal said.
The 50th medic from the Palestine Red Crescent has been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, the PRCS said on Friday in a statement.
Haitham Bassam Abu Issa, a nurse at the PRCS clinic in Deir Al-Balah in the center of the Gaza strip, was killed while off duty on Thursday, the PRCS said.
“This brings the total number of PRCS staff and volunteers killed during the conflict to 50 – a deeply shocking figure,” the PRCS said.
Israeli restrictions on media in the Gaza Strip and difficulties in accessing some areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by rescuers and witnesses.
Israel’s military said it was continuing its operations in Gaza on Friday, after army chief Eyal Zamir announced earlier in the week that the focus would again shift to the territory.
The Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 56,331 people, mostly civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The UN considers its figures reliable.

KHARTOUM: Paramilitary shelling of the besieged Darfur city of El-Fasher in western Sudan killed 13 people including 3 children on Friday, a medical source told AFP as the United Nations announced it was seeking to secure a humanitarian pause in the city.
“Another 21 people were injured due to the artillery shelling from the Rapid Support militia,” the source said, referring to the Rapid Support Forces, at war with the regular army since April 2023.
The RSF has besieged the North Darfur state capital since May of last year and has launched repeated attacks in an attempt to seize the city of an estimated million people.
The strike came hours after Sudan’s ruling Transitional Sovereignty Council said army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan’s office had agreed in a phone call with UN chief Antonio Guterres to a “week-long humanitarian truce in El-Fasher to support UN efforts and facilitate aid access to thousands of besieged civilians.”
Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Friday said “we are making contacts with both sides with that objective.”
The UN has repeatedly warned of the plight of trapped civilians in the city, where hunger has pushed families to survive on eating leaves and peanut shells as nearly no aid is allowed in.
Civilians report soaring prices and a near-total absence of health facilities, nearly all of which have been forced shut by the fighting.
A World Food Programme facility inside El-Fasher was damaged from repeated RSF shelling last month, and in early June five aid workers were killed in an attack on a UN convoy seeking to supply the city.
The paramilitary has repeatedly attacked the city and its surrounding famine-hit displacement camps, killing hundreds of civilians and pushing hundreds of thousands of already displaced people to flee.
UNICEF has described the situation as “hell on earth” for at least 825,000 children trapped in and around El-Fasher.
The RSF conquered nearly all of the vast western region of Darfur in the early months of the war, but has been unable to seize North Darfur state capital El-Fasher despite besieging the city for over a year.
An RSF source told AFP Friday the paramilitary had not received a ceasefire proposal.
Aid sources say an official famine declaration is impossible given the lack of access to data, but mass starvation has already taken hold of the city.
Over a million people are on the brink of famine in North Darfur, according to the latest available UN figures.
Of the 10 million people currently internally displaced in Sudan — the world’s largest displacement crisis — nearly 20 percent are in North Darfur.