Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Sunday that Israeli attacks killed 134 Palestinians and wounded 425 over the previous 24-hour period as relentless US-backed Israeli strikes continue to pound targets across the Strip and Israeli forces continue to kill people seeking aid.
The Health Ministry said that five other bodies were recovered from the rubble. “A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the streets, where ambulance and civil defense crews are unable to reach them at this time,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.
Israeli strikes on Sunday included the bombing of a water distribution point in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, which killed 10 Palestinians, including six children, and 16 others were wounded. According to Reuters, the Israeli military claimed that the water site wasn’t its intended target and that it meant to hit a Palestinian Islamic Jihad target that was a few dozen meters away, although Al Jazeera reported that water distribution points are frequently targeted.
“This is not the first time it’s happening. This is close to 10 times and just in the past few months when people were directly and deliberately targeted as they were trying to get water,” said Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that an Israeli airstrike on a crowded market in Gaza City on Sunday evening killed at least 12 people, including Dr. Ahmad Qandil, a consultant general surgeon at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. Israeli attacks on Gaza have taken a huge toll on medical workers, killing more than seventy since early May, according to numbers from the Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW), a Palestinian medical organization.
Israeli strikes also hit the al-Mawasi tent camp in southern Gaza, killing at least five members of the same family, including children. In Az-Zawayda, central Gaza, five people were reported killed by an Israeli drone.
The killing of Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza have continued, with the Health Ministry recording the deaths of 28 aid seekers over the past 24 hours. The ministry said that since the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began operating at the end of May, 833 aid seekers have been killed and 5,432 have been wounded. The majority were killed traveling to and from GHF sites, but some were also killed while seeking aid deliveries from the UN and other international organizations.
The Israeli military has admitted to killing some civilians near aid sites but disputes the Health Ministry’s numbers. But on Friday, the UN said that at least 798 aid seekers had been killed up to that point, which was higher than the Health Ministry’s number at the time. The ministry said in its Friday update that it recorded 788 aid-related deaths. According to Sky News, the UN’s numbers were based on a range of sources, including hospitals, cemeteries, and families in Gaza, NGOs, its partners on the ground, and health authorities.
The Health Ministry said on Sunday that the latest violence has brought the death toll since October 7, 2023, to 58,026 and the number of wounded to 138,520. Studies have found that the Health Ministry’s numbers are a significant undercount, and estimates that factor in indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege and destruction of all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure bring the death toll into the hundreds of thousands.