AT least 98 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza since dawn, according to medical sources, with Al Jazeera’s team on the ground reporting the intensification of strikes on the northern parts of the besieged enclave, where 61 people were killed in Gaza City alone.
Israeli air strikes on groups trying to secure the distribution of aid north of Gaza City killed at least 14 people on Wednesday.
At least 37 people desperately seeking any food for their families were killed by Israeli fire, including 16 killed by Israel near an aid point north of Rafah, according to the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza.
In the last 24-hour reporting period, at least eight people, including three children, died from Israeli-imposed starvation and malnutrition, bringing the total number of hunger-related deaths since the war began in October 2023 to 235, among them 106 children, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), described the deaths as “the latest in the war on children and childhood in Gaza”.
“This is in addition to: over 40,000 children reported killed or injured due to bombardment and airstrikes, at least 17,000 unaccompanied and separated children, and one million deeply traumatised children and out of education,” he wrote in a post on X.
“Children are children. No one should stay silent when children die, or are brutally deprived of a future, wherever these children are, including in Gaza.”
Gaza’s healthcare system has also been the subject of targeted destruction by the Israeli military, which amounts to “medicide”, UN experts said Wednesday, accusing Israel of deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics and hospitals to wipe out medical care in the enclave.
“As human beings and UN experts, we cannot remain silent about the war crimes committed before our eyes in Gaza,” said Tlaleng Mofokeng, special rapporteur on the right to health, and Francesca Albanese, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.
“In addition to bearing witness to an ongoing genocide, we are also bearing witness to a ‘medicide’, a sinister component of the intentional creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, which constitutes an act of genocide,” the experts said.
“Health and care workers have been continuously targeted, detained, tortured and are now, like the rest of the population, being starved,” they added.
As the death toll continues to rise in Gaza from Israel’s attacks and its punishing blockade, a delegation from the Palestinian group Hamas was scheduled to begin discussions in Egypt over a potential ceasefire on Wednesday.
The previous round of indirect ceasefire talks in Qatar ended in deadlock in late July, after Israel and the United States withdrew their delegations hours after Hamas submitted its response to a truce proposal.
The talks in Cairo will focus on ways to stop the war, deliver aid, and “end the suffering of our people in Gaza”, Hamas official Taher al-Nono said.