The afternoon blast hit a warehouse where officers of Hamas’ Sahm (“Arrow”) police unit were handing out confiscated flour, witnesses said.
Doctors at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital counted seven Sahm officers, a child and other by-standers among the dead and treated about 30 wounded. Stretchers lined corridors already crowded with casualties from earlier strikes.
Food has been scarce since Israel’s March–April blockade, which the United Nations says pushed many of Gaza’s 2.3 million people “towards critical famine”.
Deliveries remain choked by rubble-blocked roads, security checks and continuing bombardment, and hundreds of trucks have been looted by armed groups or desperate crowds.
Israel and the United States have promoted the privately run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to replace UN distribution networks they accuse Hamas of siphoning – an allegation aid agencies deny.
GHF opens four hubs unpredictably, often at night, drawing tens of thousands who must cross military zones where, witnesses and medics say, Israeli forces have repeatedly fired on them.
In a statement on Thursday, Médecins Sans Frontières said more than 500 people had been killed and nearly 4,000 wounded while seeking food in recent weeks, calling the GHF scheme “degrading by design” and demanding Israel lift its siege.
The fenced sites “force Palestinians to choose between starvation or risking their lives”, said Aitor Zabalgogeaskoa, MSF’s Gaza emergency coordinator.
The Israeli army insists it uses only “warning shots” against perceived threats and says some UN aid convoys still enter; health officials and NGOs say the flow is “grossly inadequate”.
Israeli government says that its military forces have targeted Hamas-controlled police and security forces in the Gaza Strip since the war began after Hamas gunmen killed 1,200 people and abducted 251 in southern Israel on 7 October 2023. The Gaza health ministry puts the Palestinian death toll since then at 56,259, mostly civilians.
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Source: The Guardian, Associated Press, MSF