Live: At least 75 killed in Israeli strikes on second day of Eid al-Adha
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The Associated Press is reporting tank and gunfire at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's distribution site.
The centre was surrounded by Israeli military checkpoints in Rafah, the southern Gaza border city.
US military contractors guarding the food aid withdrew as starving Palestinians raced to get meagre food packages causing chaotic scenes.
The Gaza media office has slammed Israel, calling the video footage of starving Palestinians overrunning a US-led aid centre an indictment against Israel and its policy of "starvation, siege, and bombing".
“Thousands of starving civilians - besieged and cut off from food and medicine by the occupation for nearly 90 days - rushed to these areas in a heartbreaking scene that ended with the storming of distribution centres and the seizing of food under the crushing weight of hunger,” the media office said.
Israeli forces responded to the starving crowd “by opening fire and injuring several citizens, which clearly reflects the total collapse of the so-called humanitarian track that the occupation claims to uphold", the media office added.
The US backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said on Tuesday it was overwhelmed with people seeking food aid and that its "team" decided to withdraw because of the crowd.
In a statement the GHF said it pulled back to allow people to "take aid safely and dissipate" in order to avoid casualties.
The GHF has come under intense scrutiny from aid workers and experts.
Thousands of Palestinians have stormed a new aid distribution site in Rafah.
Israeli media reported that shots were fired at an aid distribution point in southern Gaza.
Video footage revealed crowds rushing to receive the first aid packages from aid points in Israeli-cotrolled areas by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
The incident comes hours after the GHF announced it had begun distributing aid.
Unrwa chief Phillipe Lazzarini said Israel is yet to provide evidence to substantiate its claims against the UN agency.
“To date, Unrwa has not received any response, nor has the Government of Israel shared any sufficient evidence to back up these very serious claims,” he said in a post on X.
Israel accused Unrwa staff of involvement in the Hamas led attack on southern Israel and banned the agency from operating in the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel.
“The minimum requirements are sufficient evidence and due process,” Lazzarini said. “The absence of both more than one year later raises the possibility that the accusations were unfounded.”
Over the past 20 months, the Government of Israel has continuously made unsubstantiated claims against @UNRWA and its neutrality.
— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) May 27, 2025
These claims have put the lives of UNRWA staff at serious risk and harmed the reputation of the Agency.
Here are extracts from a letter I recently… pic.twitter.com/zUy71JTDAi
In the early hours of 19 May, 13-year-old Mohammad Ahmad Kamel Sarhan’s world was turned upside down.
“I was asleep at 6am when I suddenly heard the sound of an explosion,” the boy told Middle East Eye.
Israeli soldiers had stormed the home of Sarhan and his family in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, as part of a special operation aimed at capturing the teenager's father, a senior leader of the Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Resistance Committees.
Sarhan had been sleeping next to his mother, father and his four siblings Yusuf, 2, Jude, 9, Mahmoud, 10, and Wael, 11.
"We all live together - me, my parents, and my siblings - in a single room with a kitchen and a bathroom, all built atop the rubble of our destroyed home," he explained.
Read more: Father killed, mother abducted and tortured: Gaza boy recounts Israeli raid
The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement has said that the Israeli raids on money exchanges in the occupied West Bank mark a "dangerous escalation" in the "open war against our people, targeting their very existence and cause”.
“This new aggression is part of the policy of siege and starvation that targets the foundations of our people’s steadfastness and aims to break their will,” the group said, urging the Palestinian Authority to "defend" Palestinians from the attacks and “halt its policy of security coordination” with Israel.
Norway is set to reject campaigners' call to instruct its $1.8 trillion wealth fund to boycott any company selling products and services in the occupied Palestinian territories, Reuters is reporting.
According to a source familiar with the proceedings, a majority in the Norwegian parliament's finance committee decided that only companies that can be linked to the violation of international law should be excluded from the fund's portfolio, not just any companies with a presence in these areas.
Last year, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories was illegal.
Currently, the fund, which operates under ethical guidelines set by the Norwegian parliament, has blacklisted 11 companies for assisting Israel's occupation, the last of which was Israeli petrol station chain Paz PAZ.TA earlier this month.
At the end of last year the fund had just over $2bn invested in 65 Israeli companies, or 0.1 percent of its total.
Reporting by Reuters
A young girl with a short ponytail steps over shattered rubble, flames around her, trying to escape.
The five-year-old child in the viral footage, which showed the aftermath of an Israeli strikes on a Gaza City school sheltering displaced Palestinians, was Ward Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil.
Ward, who has spent nearly half her life surviving Israel’s war on Gaza, was fleeing the bombed classroom at the Fahmi al-Jerjawi school after witnessing her mother and four siblings burn to death.
“I received a phone call after midnight telling me the school where my brother and his family had taken shelter was bombed,” her uncle, Iyad Muhammed al-Sheikh Khalil, told Middle East Eye.
“I was horrified and wanted to rush there immediately, but I couldn’t. The bombing was still intense and it was completely dark.”
Read more: ‘She saw them burn’: Gaza girl ‘devastated’ after family killed in Israeli strike
The UN has said it has no information on whether the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid distributions in the territory have actually taken place.
The newly formed US-backed foundation released images of aid distribution from its hubs in the Strip on Tuesday.
But Unrwa spokesperson Juliette Touma told reporters that UN agencies do not “have any information” about aid deliveries by the GHF into Gaza.
“We know what’s needed, we know what’s missing, and we are very, very far from that daily target,” Touma said.
“The needs are 500-600 trucks at a minimum that should go into Gaza, loaded with supplies. Not only food but also medicine, medical supplies, vaccines for children, fuel, water and other basics for people’s survival.”
A spokesperson of the UN humanitarian office dismissed the GHF's activities as a "distraction".
“What is actually needed is a reopening of all the crossings into Gaza, a secure environment within Gaza, and faster facilitation of missions and final approvals of all the emergency supplies that we have just outside the border and needs to get in," OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke said.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said that Israeli attacks on Gaza are no "longer comprehensible" and "can no longer be justified".
"The massive military strikes by the Israelis in the Gaza Strip no longer reveal any logic to me. How they serve the goal of confronting terror. ... In this respect, I view this very, very critically," Merz said in Turku, Finland.
"I am also not among those who said it first ... But it seemed and seems to me that the time has come when I must say publicly, (that) what is currently happening is no longer comprehensible."
German Foreign minister Johann Wadephul also said in an interview with the WDR broadcaster that Berlin's "full support for the right to exist and the security of the state of Israel must not be instrumentalised for the conflict and the warfare currently being waged in the Gaza Strip,"
The comments mark an abrupt shift from Germany's unwavering support of Israel since it launched its war on Gaza in October 2023.
Together with Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, Merz called for increased international pressure on Israel to allow aid into Gaza.
Sweden has summoned Israel’s ambassador to the country, urging Israel to allow aid into Gaza.
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen has condemned Israel's "abhorrent" attacks on civilian targets in Gaza, including yesterday's deadly attack on a school which killed 33 people.
"The expansion of Israel's military operations in Gaza targeting civilian infrastructure, among them a school that served as a shelter for displaced Palestinian families, killing civilians, including children, is abhorrent," von der Leyen said, according to an EU readout of the call.
"The European Commission has always supported -- and will continue to support -- Israel's right to security and self-defence," she said.
Von der Leyen demanded that Israel "immediately restore aid delivery in line with humanitarian principles, with the participation of the UN and other international humanitarian partners".
Von der Leyen's comments come a week after the EU launched a review of its association agreement with Israel over alleged human rights abuses in Gaza, after 17 of its 27 member states backed the move.
Throughout Israel's war on Gaza which started in October 2023, von der Leyen has repeatedly voiced support for Israel and affirmed its "right to defend itself".
In May 2024, the Geneva International Peace Research Institute (GIPRI) called on the ICC to investigate von der Leyen for alleged “complicity in war crimes and genocide committed by Israel”.
The Gaza health ministry said on Tuesday that at least 79 people were killed and another 163 wounded over the past 24 hours.
The death toll in Gaza now stands at 54,056 people killed since the start of the war, with thousands remaining missing.
The Israeli media outlet Haaretz reported that Palestinians in the occupied West Bank fled the Bedouon village of Mughayyir al-Dir, following settlers’ harassment and the erection of an outpost within metres from their houses.
Upon the Palestinians return to the village to retrieve their possessions, clashes broke out between the residents and settlers, leading to the hospitalisation of six Palestinians, an Israeli human rights activist and a settler.
According to Haaretz, Israeli forces declined requests to remove the building – which was constructed last Sunday - and said it was not invading the village’s land.
Witnesses told Haaretz that “settlers opened fire, threw rocks and hit activists and Palestinians with clubs. One settler was hit by Palestinians with a stone to his head”.
Over the past two years, settlers have been preventing Palestinians living in the Mughayyir al-Deir from leaving the village with sheep, limiting their access to feeding.
The new outpost erected on the village outskirts changed things significantly for the worse and led to the villagers' departure.
"They go up to the houses and curse," Ibrahim Malihat, 60, told Haaretz.
"We were afraid for our children and our daughters, and feared they would steal sheep. We are displaced. We gave up against our will," he said.
The UN has warned that 95 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land has been rendered unusable by Israeli attacks, further exacerbating the risk of famine in the territory.
A new joint assessment released on Tuesday by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) found that over 80 percent of Gaza’s crop land has been damaged by Israeli attacks.
According to the report, only 4.6 percent of it can be cultivated, while 71.2 percent of Gaza’s greenhouses and 82.8 percent of agricultural wells have been laid to waste by Israeli attacks.
The FAO said that Israel’s targeting of agricultural infrastructure in the territory risked “further deteriorating food production capacity and exacerbating the risk of famine”.
Beth Bechdol, FAO’s deputy director-general, warned that the destruction could precipitate the "collapse of Gaza’s agri-food system and of lifelines”.
