The following is from the news roundup during the 7 August livestream. Watch the entire episode here.

Israel killed at least 730 Palestinians and injured nearly 4,500 between 30 July and 6 August, according to official records from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.

More than 130 Palestinians were killed between Tuesday and Wednesday alone, 87 of whom were killed while trying to acquire food aid.

Some images were released before Israeli officials threatened journalists that these aid drops could be canceled if media workers shared the footage any further.

The United Nations humanitarian office stated on 6 August that the new orders span 1.5 square miles across five neighborhoods in Gaza and Khan Younis governorates.

“Shelter materials have not been allowed to enter Gaza since 2 March. The few shelter materials that are available on the local market are extremely expensive and limited in quantity, putting them out of reach for most families,” the UN stated.

Israel also attacked tents of displaced people west of Khan Younis on Wednesday, killing at least two women, while other airstrikes struck areas east of Gaza City, killing at least three people.

Reporter Saed Hasballah filmed a young boy desperately searching through the rubble for his grandparents, who were killed in an airstrike in Gaza City last week.

A mother sheltering there with her children told Al Jazeera reporters that they were sitting “when suddenly everyone started running.”

“People told us we had 10 minutes before the clinic would be bombed. I grabbed the kids and ran without taking anything. We moved about 200 meters away and waited. The strike hit the building. Around 1 or 2 am, when things calmed down, we went back but everything was gone. The tents were torn apart, everything destroyed,” she added.

Journalist Ahmed al-Danaf captured the bombing of the Sheikh Radwan health clinic building on video.

Israel also bombed buildings belonging to the Palestine Red Crescent Society several times this week.

A Red Crescent worker captured video of the bombing of the Khan Younis headquarters on 3 August, which killed one staff member, injured three others and sparked a fire.

While medical staff attempted to extinguish the fire and inspect the damage after the first strike, the Red Crescent reported that the building was hit again on the second floor, and then again on the ground floor.

“The repeated strikes during evacuation and rescue operations clearly demonstrate that the shellings were deliberate and systematic,” the Red Crescent stated.

On 6 August, just three days later, the Israeli army targeted the building again, firing an artillery shell into the eighth floor.

Airdropped aid kills nurse

Western and regional states, who remain in lockstep with Israel and its genocidal policy, are continuing their attempts at public relations management by boasting of airdropping meager amounts of food aid.

But the crossings remain largely sealed, Palestinians are killed in vast numbers at US and Israeli so-called aid distribution sites, and the Gaza population is facing catastrophic levels of starvation.

This week, Canada, Germany and Belgium, along with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Jordan, airdropped aid, as Gaza government officials once again warned that the amount of assistance is only a small fraction of what is needed.

On 1 August, Palestinians in Gaza filmed themselves opening up some of the airdropped aid parcels from Spain, showing that some of the food packets were covered in black mold.

And these humiliating airdrops continue to kill starving people.

On Monday, Uday al-Quraan, a nurse at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, was killed when an aid box fell from the sky onto his tent shelter.

“This is humiliation,” he said. “This is a humiliation first and foremost. The aid is not enough and isn’t enough to fill half a truck.”

Al-Quraan went on to show the paltry amount of aid from an airdrop, which he said was filled with sand.

Israeli soldiers use silencers on weapons at “aid” sites

Meanwhile, Israeli forces at the Gaza boundary crossings and Israeli and American mercenary forces operating the private so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites continue to trap, injure and kill starving Palestinians every day.

On Friday, 1 August, Al Jazeera’s Anas Al-Sharif reported that for the first time, Israeli soldiers used silencers on their weapons to shoot at starving Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza.

He spoke to multiple witnesses who confirmed the use of silencers in Beit Lahiya, while the Trump administration’s envoy Steve Witkoff and the US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visited Gaza for several hours to tour the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s operations.

Anas al-Sharif said that Israeli soldiers were trying to inflict casualties without drawing too much attention.

Huckabee, who is an evangelical Christian Zionist, said this week that the Trump administration is looking to scale up the number of GHF sites, expanding the four sites to an eventual 16.

At the Kuwaiti Hospital in Khan Younis, the hospital’s director Dr. Suhaib al-Hams issued a public appeal to Palestinians to avoid the death traps because his staff cannot treat the overwhelming number of victims arriving with gunshot wounds.

He said on 6 August that his hospital’s wound dressing department was out of service “due to a shortage of medical supplies.”

This week, a group of United Nations experts called for the immediate dismantling of the GHF, demanding that the private company and its executive be held accountable, and to allow “experienced and humanitarian actors from the UN and civil society alike to take back the reins of managing and distributing lifesaving aid.”

The experts urged UN member states “to impose a full arms embargo on Israel due to its multiple violations of international law, and suspend trade and investment agreements that may result in harming the Palestinians and hold corporate entities accountable.”

Disappearing Palestinians while collecting aid

More reports are emerging of Palestinians who have disappeared while attempting to collect aid at the private US-Israeli killing fields masquerading as aid distribution sites.

This week, Al Mezan and MENA Rights Group documented the cases of five Palestinians, including a child, who disappeared at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites. In three cases, the Israeli army acknowledged their detention, but denied having the two others, including a 16-year-old child, in their custody.

The human rights groups say that of the three men that Israel acknowledged taking from the so-called aid sites, “the Israeli army refused to disclose their place of detention and denied them their right to access legal counsel, placing them in incommunicado detention and at heightened risk of torture and ill-treatment.”

In an appeal, the groups urged the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances to intervene with the Israeli authorities to clarify the fate and whereabouts of the five disappeared Palestinians, and to immediately release those detained.

The two organizations “also requested that the UN Working Group address a communication to the GHF, and to the relevant US authorities, in light of the mounting number of cases of enforced disappearances occurring at the aid distribution sites operated by the US-Israeli backed organization.”

“These five documented cases are only the tip of the iceberg,” the groups say, “and reveal yet another disturbing pattern of grave human rights violations committed by Israeli authorities in Gaza: abductions of Palestinian civilians seeking humanitarian aid at distribution sites operated by the GHF.”

Engineering chaos

The Gaza government media office issued a series of statements over the past week on the worsening of the humanitarian crisis and the reinforcement of engineered chaos in Gaza, in the context of Israel allowing in a trickle of aid trucks that fail to meet the enormous need of starving people.

The media office stated on 6 August that over the past week and a half, the total number of aid trucks that have entered the Gaza Strip was only about 850 – an average of 85 trucks per day, or about only 14 percent of the required aid.

Gaza needs at least 600 trucks of aid and fuel per day to meet the minimum demands of the health, service, and food sectors, the media office added.

Most of the aid, the media office notes, is being looted by armed gangs working with the Israelis.

There are approximately 22,000 aid trucks stuck at the crossings, the media office stated, “most of which belong to UN and international organizations and various entities. The Israeli occupation is deliberately preventing their entry as part of a systematic policy of engineered starvation, blockade, and chaos, as part of the ongoing genocide.”

On the night of 5 August, at least 20 Palestinians were killed and dozens were injured when an aid truck overturned on top of people who were trying to obtain food. The Israelis forced the truck driver to drive on unsafe and damaged roads, which it had previously bombed and were not suitable for passage, the media office stated.

Starved to death

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza reported on Thursday that at least four new deaths had been reported due to starvation, bringing the total recorded number of victims of Israel’s starvation policy to 197, more than half of them children.

Among those who starved to death over the past week was 17-year-old Atef Abu Khater.

He died on 2 August. His weight had dropped from 154 pounds to just 55 pounds when he died, his family said – roughly what a 9-year-old child should weigh.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reported from Gaza City, saying “We hear from his family members and others who knew him that he used to be a local sports champion. He ended up losing a lot of weight, becoming acutely malnourished, and ultimately dying. … He was one of thousands of severe malnutrition cases throughout Gaza.”

A small wound killed a toddler

Doctors and medical staff are overwhelmed, meanwhile, with mass casualties and dwindling supplies of fuel, medications and their own energy as they, too, are starving.

Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, the director of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, said that his hospital’s occupancy rate is at 300 percent, and warned that anesthesia and blood units are in severely low supply.

“Many of the injuries we receive are concentrated in the upper parts of the body … we are losing wounded people due to the lack of sufficient operating rooms,” he told Al Jazeera Arabic.

Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Canada-based emergency physician and frequent guest of this program who is currently working in Gaza, told Al Jazeera on 6 August that there has not been a day in the last two and half months when there has not been a near-complete shortage of blood.

“I cannot get out of my mind one of the cases, in which a 1-and-a-half-year-old boy was right in front of us with a tiny little wound that happened to hit an artery. He was bleeding quite a bit, but not so much that he had to die,” Loubani said.

“He was small, obviously malnourished, and all he needed was a little bit of blood; however, it was a tent massacre, and so every single member of his family had died. As a result, they weren’t able to donate blood,” he added.

“By the time we were able to find somebody to go and donate blood and bring it, we could see that even if we gave him blood, we weren’t going to be able to follow it up, and that that blood could be used to save somebody else. We had to sit there watching a little boy who we knew was saveable and treatable, die in front of us,” Loubani said.

Highlighting resilience

Finally, as we always do, we wanted to highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Palestine and around the world.

Members of the Sameer Project, a mutual aid organization in Gaza, supported play and music therapy with children at the Refaat Alareer camp for displaced families. These sessions, with the experienced therapist Jaber and his team, provide a safe space for the children to express themselves through music and various activities, the Sameer Project writes.

Tags

• Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
• starvation
• attacks on medical workers
• forced displacement
• disappearance
• aid airdrops
• Tarek Loubani

• Nora Barrows-Friedman's blog

• Facebook
• Twitter

• Donate Now