War on Gaza: Aid workers killed getting food to people ‘on the precipice of famine’
An Israeli air raid has killed six international aid workers and a Palestinian driver.
The United States-based aid group, World Central Kitchen (WCK), confirmed on Tuesday that its staff members were killed in a “targeted attack” by the Israeli military. The dead were from Palestine, Australia, Poland, the United Kingdom, as well as a US-Canada citizen.
WCK said the attack came as its staff were delivering food from its latest shipment to Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been pushed to the brink of famine by Israel’s offensive.
Footage showed the bodies of those killed at a hospital in the central town of Deir el-Balah. Several of them wore protective gear with the charity’s logo.
Safety concerns for humanitarian workers are again a focus after the killing of seven aid workers in an Israeli attack, says UNICEF’s spokeswoman Tess Ingram.
“It’s incredibly worrying for all of us. We’ve just had a meeting about it here,” she told Al Jazeera from southern Rafah in Gaza. “It’s an immense tragedy and adds to the total of more than 30,000 people killed during the war, including 174 UN colleagues. So it’s a dark day for us here.”
Ingram noted aid groups have coordination measures in place with warring factions to ensure attacks such as this do not happen.
“That is not functioning here in the Gaza Strip. We’ve been warning for a while that it’s not working – we’re not getting the security assurances that we need. It’s even worse that these people were killed just trying to deliver food to people on the precipice of famine. It’s an unspeakable loss.”
Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary reports from the scene of the attack in Deir al Balah, central Gaza.
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