On 24 June, Israeli tanks and drones opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians waiting for food aid along Salah al-Din Street in central Gaza, killing at least 50 people at the distribution site, according to Al Mayadeen correspondents and medical staff at Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. The hospital reported receiving 19 martyrs and 146 wounded, 62 of them in critical condition.
In another aid-related massacre, a total of 79 Palestinians were killed across the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, including five whose bodies were recovered from the rubble, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. At least 289 others were wounded in Israeli attacks that day.
Civil defense teams retrieved several of the dead from a home in the Al-Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City. One day earlier, the ministry had reported 39 Palestinians killed and 317 injured in similar strikes across the strip.
Of those killed on 24 June, 49 were aid seekers, according to the ministry. The total number of Palestinians killed while attempting to access food—referred to by health officials as “livelihood martyrs”—has now risen to 516, with more than 3,799 injured.
The UN human rights office condemned the killings and linked them directly to the newly established, U.S.-backed aid delivery system operating in Gaza.
“Desperate, hungry people in Gaza continue to face the inhumane choice of either starving to death or risk being killed while trying to get food,” UN spokesperson Thameen al-Kheetan said in Geneva.
He described the system as “Israel’s militarised humanitarian assistance mechanism,” warning that “the weaponization of food for civilians, in addition to restricting or preventing their access to life-sustaining services, constitutes a war crime and, under certain circumstances, may constitute elements of other crimes under international law.”
According to Kheetan, over 410 Palestinians had been killed while attempting to access aid as of last week, based on figures from Palestinian health officials, NGOs, and other sources still being verified by the UN.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini echoed the condemnation during a press conference in Berlin, calling the U.S.-backed system “an abomination that humiliates and degrades desperate people” and “a death trap costing more lives than it saves.”
The killings around Gaza’s aid sites have continued without pause, even as Israel expands its military campaigns on other fronts. While bombing neighboring countries and provoking direct confrontation with Iran, Israeli forces maintain full control over the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose fenced, militarized aid distribution points have become flashpoints of repeated massacres.
The UN’s accusations of weaponized food delivery come as these sites—branded as humanitarian corridors by Washington and Tel Aviv -continue to produce mounting civilian casualties under armed supervision.