‘Skeletons marching to death’: Palestinians face hunger and gunfire as Israel pushes into central Gaza
“We were just skeletons, walking.” This is how Younis, 32, a father of four, described the death march to the Gaza aid convoy on Sunday when Israeli forces opened fire.
Shortly after the food trucks arrived, a shell blew up a small crowd sending people flying through the air to the side of him. Then a bullet ripped through the air by his head.
“The gunfire was so intense that it was like they were aiming to drink our blood,” he told The Independent, his voice still shaking.
“I feel like we’ve been put on a chicken farm and starved and killed.”
Trapped under a mound of people – some alive, some injured, some dead – he managed to crawl free with a single kilo of flour, which later, in the scrum to safety, he had to drop.
“Since the morning, my children had woken me up crying ‘Daddy I want to eat’. These words burned my blood and made me go to danger.”
The UN’s global hunger monitor has repeatedly warned that nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are teetering on the edge of famine.
Accusing Hamas of stealing supplies to fuel its war, Israel has imposed sieges on Gaza, either fully restricting or significantly restricting aid into the tiny 25-mile long strip, as well as corralling people into areas. These are policies that legal experts have told The Independent would amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and even “genocide in action” – something Israel denies.
On Sunday, the World Food Programme (WFP) said a rare convoy of 25 trucks carrying vital food assistance had been permitted to cross into northern Gaza. It was met with large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies – among them, Younis.
“As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire,” the WFP said.
The Palestinian health authorities said that at least 99 people were killed in what is believed to be the deadliest day yet for families seeking aid since the war began in October 2023 – over 800 in total have been killed just trying to get food. The Israeli military has said it fired warning shots “to remove an immediate threat”, but has questioned the death toll reported by the Palestinians.
A day later – on Monday – Israel announced an expansion of its military operation against Hamas, announcing fresh forced evacuation orders for parts of Deir al-Balah, a southwestern area of Gaza mostly labeled as a “safe zone” and home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced during more than 21 months of war in Gaza, as well as several vital UN facilities, aid agency guesthouses, and clinics.
And so the situation in Gaza is so dire that even the foreign secretary David Lammy and his counterparts from 24 other nations said on Monday that the suffering of civilians has reached “new depths”, and told Israel that the war must “end now”.
Belgium’s King Philippe, who is rarely outspoken about this conflict, separately called it a “disgrace to humanity” and again called for “an immediate end to this unbearable crisis”.
