Author: Kamran Faqir
Article Date Published: 31 July 2025 at 11:40 GMT
Category: Middle East | Palestine-Gaza | US-Israel At War
Source(s): Veritas Press C.I.C. | Multi News Agencies
GAZA — A new wave of carnage has struck Gaza’s starving population, as Israeli forces intensified their military campaign with deadly attacks on civilians waiting for humanitarian aid. The latest massacre, one of dozens since Israel’s war on the besieged territory began, left at least 34 more Palestinians dead Thursday, just a day after 51 were gunned down while collecting food in the Sudanese area of Gaza City.
Humanitarian organisations, local doctors, and international observers are calling these attacks systematic war crimes, part of a broader campaign of extermination against Palestinians in Gaza. Meanwhile, Palestinian resistance factions have responded with intensified strikes against Israeli forces in Khan Yunis and surrounding areas.
Aid Lines Become Kill Zones:
At least 15 civilians were killed and several were wounded Thursday morning while queuing for food aid in central Gaza, according to Al Jazeera and hospital sources at Al-Awda and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospitals.
“We received patients with gunshot wounds to the head, chest, and legs,” said Dr. Mahmoud Salameh, an emergency surgeon at Al-Awda Hospital. “These people were unarmed. They came for flour, not to fight. This is not collateral damage, it’s deliberate targeting.”
Survivors painted a harrowing scene. “We were waiting for the aid trucks, suddenly there were loud shots, and people started falling to the ground,” said Abu Rami, a 45-year-old displaced father of five. “The soldiers didn’t even warn us. They just fired.”
The massacre follows Wednesday’s bloodbath in the Sudanese neighbourhood of Gaza City, where Israeli forces shot dead 51 civilians and wounded 348 others, according to the Gaza Government Media Office. The office released disturbing footage showing bodies strewn across the street, some with their hands still clutching empty bags.
“This is not war. This is starvation warfare,” said Talal Abu Zarifa, a spokesperson for the Gaza-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). “Israel is using hunger as a weapon, and then killing people when they come for the crumbs.”
Starvation by Design: Humanitarian Catastrophe Worsens.
Despite the arrival of 112 humanitarian trucks on Wednesday, most of the aid was looted amidst chaos and desperation. Many aid sites remain unsafe, with Israel continuing to strike or fire on distribution centres, many of which are run under the oversight of the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
A joint report by the World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) issued on Tuesday warned that Gaza is “on the brink of a full-scale famine.” As of this week, at least 155 Palestinians, including dozens of children, have died of starvation.
Dr. Tamer el-Hindi, a paediatrician at Al-Nasser Children’s Hospital, said many children now show signs of “advanced wasting and irreversible organ failure.” He added, “We’re not talking about poverty. We’re talking about siege-induced famine. This is manufactured.”
Yet Israeli officials remain defiant. Transportation Minister Miri Regev dismissed famine claims as “lies,” stating on X: “There is no famine. There is no humanitarian disaster. And… there are no innocents.” She posted the front page of The New York Times showing a Gazan mother carrying her starving son, calling it “propaganda.”
Her remarks drew widespread outrage. Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, condemned Regev’s statement as “genocidal rhetoric aimed at justifying mass atrocities.” Amnesty International warned that Israeli officials’ dehumanising language “may amount to incitement to genocide under international law.”
Drone Strikes, Child Casualties, And Flattened Shelters:
In addition to the massacre at aid lines, Israel continued air and drone assaults across the Strip. A drone strike in Al-Mawasi, near Khan Yunis, killed three people, two of them children, and injured over 15 others. A separate drone strike on Bir 19, also in Khan Yunis, killed two more children in their displacement tent.
“They target tents now,” said Fatima Qassem, a local resident who lost her niece and nephew in one of the strikes. “The children were playing with plastic bottles, not holding weapons.”
In northern Gaza City, an airstrike levelled an apartment belonging to the Salfiti family, killing three and wounding several others. The attack ignited a large fire, delaying emergency responders and causing further injuries.
“These are not military sites,” said Omar Shakir, Israel-Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch. “This is collective punishment, which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.”
Resistance Responds: Al-Qassam Hits Israeli Forces.
Amid the humanitarian disaster, Palestinian resistance factions have ramped up armed operations. On Thursday, Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, announced that it had shelled Israeli troops and vehicles in the Al-Qarara area east of Khan Yunis using mortar fire.
Earlier in the week, Al-Qassam detonated three barrel bombs near the Batn al-Sameen area, reportedly killing and wounding multiple Israeli soldiers. On Saturday, resistance fighters destroyed two armoured personnel carriers with explosive devices and a third with a Yasin-105 anti-tank missile in Abasan al-Kabira.
Footage released by Al-Qassam shows damaged Israeli vehicles and soldiers being evacuated by helicopters. While the Israeli army refuses to disclose casualty figures, military analysts believe the resistance operations are inflicting significant losses.
“These attacks prove that despite the destruction, Palestinian fighters maintain the capacity to resist,” said Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American analyst and senior fellow at the Arab Centre, Washington DC. “Israel’s narrative of ‘mission accomplished’ in Khan Yunis is demonstrably false.”
Mounting Legal Pressure And International Inaction:
As images of starving children, bombed-out homes, and lifeless bodies continue to circulate globally, legal and diplomatic pressure on Israel grows. In November, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Separately, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is hearing a genocide case brought by South Africa, backed by countries including Brazil, Turkey, and Malaysia.
On Monday, two leading Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, issued a joint statement explicitly accusing Israel of committing genocide. “We have witnessed the systematic dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare system, the mass killing of civilians, and starvation policies, all pointing to intent,” the statement read.
Still, Israel enjoys continued military support from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Washington has vetoed multiple UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions, while British defence firms continue supplying components used in Israeli airstrikes.
“This is not just a war on Gaza, it’s a war on international law,” said Michael Lynk, former UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories. “If this level of destruction and starvation does not trigger international action, then the entire post-WWII legal framework is a hollow shell.”
Conclusion: Deliberate Devastation, Global Complicity.
What is unfolding in Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis born of natural disaster or war gone awry; it is a calculated, state-engineered campaign of mass killing,ethnic cleansing, and starvation, executed with military precision and political impunity. The massacres at aid lines, the targeting of displaced children in tents, and the systematic destruction of food systems and health infrastructure form a pattern too deliberate to dismiss as collateral damage. These are not the byproducts of conflict; they are its intended outcomes.
With over 100,000 Palestinians killed, 377,000 wounded, and 90% of Gaza’s population displaced, Israel’s ten-month-long war is being described by rights groups and UN officials as the most destructive assault on a civilian population in modern history. Repeated massacres at aid lines, targeted strikes on children, and statements denying the existence of innocent civilians point to a policy that goes far beyond military objectives. It is the coordinated use of massacre, mass displacement, and engineered famine, designed to purge the Palestinian people from the Gaza Strip, a genocidal war against a nation, a people.
“This is not a humanitarian crisis,” said Raji Sourani, Director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “This is a crime against humanity in real-time.”
The repeated targeting of civilians seeking food, the use of drones against shelters, and the open dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israeli officials all point to a campaign that meets the legal threshold for genocide. Statements like those of Israeli Minister Miri Regev, who declared there are “no innocents” in Gaza, are not rhetorical excess; they are ideological justifications for mass atrocity and ethnic erasure.
At the heart of the relentless propaganda campaign pushed by Israeli leaders lies a strategic objective: to evade mounting international accountability. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, facing arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court and a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, have a vested interest in prolonging the war. The longer the war drags on, the more they can shift the narrative from legal scrutiny to security rhetoric, flooding global media with images of hostages and fear-mongering about Palestinian resistance. Prolonging the war is not about security; it is about survival for a leadership trying to escape justice. And with every day that passes, the propaganda grows more brazen, designed to desensitise the world and generate sympathy for the killers, not their victims.
And yet, the silence, or worse, complicity, of global powers is deafening. The United States continues to supply the weapons used to massacre civilians at food lines. The United Kingdom and European states offer diplomatic cover while their defence industries profit. UN agencies warn of famine, but are denied the authority or means to intervene. The international legal system, even as it issues arrest warrants and hears genocide cases, remains shackled by the very powers underwriting the destruction.
If international law is to retain any meaning, this moment must serve as its proving ground. The scale of devastation in Gaza, the death toll, the mass displacement, the ethnic cleansing, the mutilation of children, the annihilation of neighbourhoods, demands more than empty statements. It demands real accountability: sanctions, prosecutions, arms embargoes, military action from responsible states and an end to the impunity that has enabled a settler-colonial regime to wage war on an entire people.
This is not just about Gaza. It is about the future of international law, the credibility of human rights institutions, and whether the world will continue to allow genocide to be livestreamed, rationalised, and normalised.
The stakes are no longer abstract. In the words of one Gaza City doctor who spoke through tears over a child’s lifeless body:
“History will ask what you did when we cried for bread, and they shot us instead.”
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