News - Middle East: Israel has carried out two deadly attacks on newly established aid sites run by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), killing dozens of Palestinians in the third and fourth such attacks on the aid distribution centers in Gaza since they began operating last week.

Early on Sunday morning, the Israeli forces opened fire, killing at least 40 people, and injuring 150 others at a GHF site in Rafah.

Soon after, a Palestinian was reported killed in a shooting at the GHF’s distribution point, in Gaza City, south of the so-called Netzarim Corridor.

The US-backed aid sites began operations in the Gaza Strip last Monday. Early the next morning, as thousands of Palestinians lined up at the aid site, Israeli forces opened fire, killing three Palestinians and injuring dozens.

The GHF said it opened a second site on Wednesday, the same day that Israeli forces again opened fire on aid seekers at one of its sites west of Rafah, this time killing at least six Palestinians.

Gaza Media Office said in a statement on Sunday that in less than a week the Israeli regime has killed 50 people and wounded hundreds at GHF sites.

“[These killings] reflect the nature of these areas as mass death traps, not humanitarian relief points,” the statement warned.

“We confirm to the entire world that what is happening is a systematic and malicious use of aid as a tool of war, employed to blackmail starving civilians and forcibly gather them in exposed killing points, managed and monitored by the occupation army and funded and politically covered by the occupation and the US administration, which bears full moral and legal responsibility for these crimes,” it added.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has condemned “the new massacre of the starving people in Rafah” saying it was “a genocide with international complicity and American participation.”

Hamas in a statement on Sunday also condemned the “horrific massacre” and said the resistance group holds the Israeli regime and the US administration responsible for the crime.

“This massacre confirms the fascist nature of the occupation and its criminal objectives behind this mechanism, where it uses centers under its control as traps to lure starving innocent people, practicing the most brutal forms of killing, humiliation, and abuse against them,” it noted.

GHF is an Israel-US-backed group, based in Geneva that has been set up to function as an alternative to the already established methods of aid delivery, through UN-affiliated organizations, to Gaza.

GHF has claimed that since the Israeli regime allowed for a limited entrance of humanitarian aid into Gaza, it has delivered and distributed “many” truckloads of food among the population.

The Geneva-based group has claimed that based on the new method of delivery and distribution, designed by the regime and the US, it will distribute 300 million meals in its first 90 days of operation.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) spokesperson, Jens Laerke, said about GHF that “It is a distraction from what is actually needed, which is a reopening of all the crossings into Gaza; a secure environment within Gaza; and faster facilitation of permissions and final approvals of all the emergency supplies that we have just outside the border that need to get in.”

Since October 7, 2023, when the Israeli regime began its genocidal war on Gaza, it has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians and injured over 124,000 others, most of whom are children and women.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has escalated dramatically since March 2, after the Israeli regime imposed an aid blockade on the besieged territory.

Since the aid blockade began, 57 children have died from the effects of malnutrition, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

This number is likely an underestimate and is likely to increase, according to the World Health Organization.

WHO warned last month that if the situation persists, nearly 71,000 children under the age of five are expected to be acutely malnourished over the next eleven months, citing a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

Source: Press TV