Israeli forces killed and wounded dozens of Palestinians on Sunday in the northern Gaza Strip, after crowds gathered near a crossing from Israel to try to seize aid from United Nations trucks entering the enclave, according to the Gaza health ministry and health workers.
The episode was the latest in a string of deadly shootings as hunger and desperation have gripped Palestinians in Gaza during Israel’s nearly two-year campaign against Hamas.
The latest attack took place near the Zikim crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel. More than 60 people were killed while seeking aid in northern Gaza on Sunday, according to the health ministry and Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
A field hospital operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society in northern Gaza was flooded with gunshot victims from the episode near Zikim. The hospital received two of the dead and more than 100 wounded, said Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the Red Crescent.
Israeli soldiers fired “warning shots” after thousands of Gazans gathered in the area, the Israeli military said in a statement. They had opened fire to “remove an immediate threat posed to them,” it added, but did not specify the nature of the threat.
At least 32 people were killed on Saturday after Israeli soldiers began shooting near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site in southern Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry. The episode on Sunday did not occur near one of the foundation’s sites.
After the deadly shooting on Sunday, the Israeli military warned Palestinians to leave the populated areas of northern Gaza and parts of Gaza City that have been subject to previous evacuation orders, describing them as “combat zones.”
That followed an Israeli military order to Palestinians earlier in the day to evacuate parts of the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, one of the few areas in the territory where Israel has not conducted major ground operations during its military campaign against Hamas.
Many Palestinians had sought refuge around Deir al-Balah after being displaced several times from other parts of the enclave, because it has remained largely intact during the devastating 21-month Israeli campaign. The order to leave further shrinks the areas where the roughly two million residents of Gaza can live in relative safety and caused panic among Palestinians afraid that Israel was set to expand its ground invasion.
It was not clear if the evacuation notice portended an imminent expansion of Israel’s military incursion or was meant as a pressure tactic to wrest concessions from Hamas in the sluggish negotiations for a cease-fire.
More than 57,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children, have been killed during the war, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The war was ignited by a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 others taken hostage.