Seven more Palestinians, including a child, were killed in the past 24 hours due to starvation induced by Israel's continuous blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the director of Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital said.
This has raised the death toll of Palestinians who have died from hunger and malnutrition to 169, including 93 children.
17-year-old Atef Abu Khater, who died from hunger on Saturday, used to be a local sports champion, according to media reports.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has described the children in Gaza affected by Israel's aid blockade as "walking corpses."
Children arriving at UNRWA clinics are skeletal, listless, and dangerously close to death. Without urgent nutritional treatment, they won’t survive, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said.
"Families are no longer coping; they are breaking. Parents are too hungry to feed their children. They can’t even follow basic medical instructions. Their very existence is under threat," he said.
"This is not a crisis. It’s a collapse," he stressed.
'We're like dogs chasing bones'
Even as Israel has allowed limited aid to be air dropped into Gaza, after months long blockade of all kinds of humanitarian assistance, starving Palestinians are finding it far from a relief.
Most of the air-dropped packets are damaged when they crash on landing, forcing desperate Palestinians to sift through sand for bits of food and scrape whatever they can off the ground, an experience they find humiliating, according to Al Jazeera.
"We’re like dogs chasing after a bone. Why do they throw things like that? We don’t want them to help us in that way?" Rana Attia, a displaced Palestinian in Gaza was quoted by Al Jazeera as saying.
Eslam al-Telbany, a mother who was desperately seeking food to feed her hungry children ran after air-dropped aid, only to be dissappointed.
"I went and my children prayed that I return with food. They haven’t eaten or drunk anything for two days. This breaks my heart that they’re waiting for me to feed them,” she said.
According to locals, the limited aid entering Gaza is also being stolen by armed gangs and later sold at very high prices -- double or triple the standard black-market price.
Meanwhile, Israel on Saturday killed at least 30 Palestinians, including 13 aid-seekers in different attacks across the enclave.
According to the UN human rights office, at least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while waiting for aid near the distribution sites of US-backed and Israel-operated Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
"In total, since 27 May, at least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food; 859 in the vicinity of (US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites and 514 along the routes of food convoys," the UN agency's office for the Palestinian territories said in a statement.
A former GHF guard has revealed to the media that the Israeli military used "automatic machinegun fire, artillery rounds, mortar rounds, and at times, tank fire from the Merkava tank against unarmed, starving civilians, women, children, the disabled" seeking aid.
"Never in my military career, 25 years of service in multiple combat locations around the world, have I seen anyone use a 'warning shot' from a belt-fed machinegun,” he was quoted as saying by Al Jazeera.
"I have never witnessed something to this level of destruction, this level of dehumanisation of a population, and the abhorrent, unnecessary escalation of force and unnecessary force used against an unarmed population," he added.
The UN and other rights organisations have refused to cooperate with the GHF, slamming it for "aiding" Israel in its genocidal war against Gaza.
At least 60,430 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza so far, with more than half of it being women and children. Israel has also targeted and killed over 200 journalists and more than 1000 healthcare workers and aid workers.