Palestinians distraught over relatives missing at deadly Gaza aid sites

As Israel’s forced starvation tightens its grip on Gaza’s entire population, an increasing number of Palestinian families are frantically searching for news of relatives who undertook perilous journeys to get food from aid distribution points, never to return.

Khaled Obaid has been searching for his beloved son, Ahmed, for two months, scanning every passing vehicle on the coastal road in Deir-el-Balah, hoping against all odds that one of them might bring him home.

The boy had left the displaced family’s tent in the central town to find food for his parents and sister, who had lost her husband during the war, and headed to the Zikim crossing point, where aid trucks enter northern Gaza.

“He hasn’t returned until now. He went because he was hungry. We have nothing to eat,” the distraught father told Al Jazeera, breaking down in tears with his wife under the blue tarpaulin where they are sheltering.

Khaled reported his son’s disappearance to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and every official body he could reach, to radio silence. To this day, he has received no answers on Ahmed’s whereabouts.

Khaled’s story is all too common under Israel’s ongoing punishing blockade of Gaza, where the largely displaced population faces a stark choice between starvation and braving the bullets fired by Israeli soldiers and United States security contractors in a bid to get food from Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) sites. These distribution points have been dubbed “death traps” and “human slaughterhouses” by the United Nations and rights groups.

It is a life-or-death gamble that has taken the lives of nearly 1,400 people, shot dead mainly by the Israeli army, at the aid sites since they started operations in late May and along food convoy routes, according to figures released by the UN last week. That is, without counting the untold numbers of missing aid seekers, like Ahmed.

Human rights monitors have been collecting harrowing firsthand accounts of people who have gone missing in Gaza, only to be found later, killed by Israeli forces.

“In many cases, those who went missing are apparently killed near the aid distribution points, but due to the Israeli targeting, their bodies remained unreachable,” Maha Hussaini, the head of media at the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, told Al Jazeera.

“Many Palestinians left home with empty hands, hoping to return with a bag of flour. But many never came back,” said Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir-el-Balah. “In Gaza, the line between survival and disappearance is now heartbreakingly thin.”

As the number of missing aid seekers mounts, famine stalks the enclave, with more than 80 adults reportedly dying of starvation over the past five weeks alone, and 93 children succumbing to man-made malnutrition since the war began.

Authorities in Gaza say an average of 84 trucks have entered the besieged enclave each day since Israel eased restrictions on July 27. But aid organisations say at least 600 aid trucks are needed per day to meet the territory’s basic needs.

‘Death circle’

On Monday, amid growing international condemnation over the mass starvation, seen by many as being deliberately engineered by Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to double down on his war goals.

Netanyahu announced that he would convene a meeting of his cabinet on Tuesday to ensure that “Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel”. Israel’s Channel 12 cited an official as saying that Netanyahu was tending towards expanding the offensive.

The announcement came on another bloody day in the Strip, with at least 74 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks since dawn on Monday, including 36 aid seekers, according to medical sources.

Among the attacks, at least three people were killed by an Israeli strike on a house in Deir el-Balah, according to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

A source at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City reported that seven people were killed in Israeli shelling on multiple areas in the Shujayea neighbourhood, east of Gaza City.

Emergency services said that two were killed in an Israeli bombing of Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza.

It also emerged on Monday that a nurse at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah was killed when he was hit by an airdropped box of aid.

This week, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, described the dangerous airdrops as a “distraction” and smokescreen.

On Monday, UNICEF warned that 28 children – essentially an entire “classroom” – are dying each day from Israeli bombardment and lack of aid.

“Gaza’s children need food, water, medicine and protection. More than anything, they need a ceasefire, NOW,” said the UN agency on X.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry called on the UN Security Council to “assume its responsibilities” by enforcing an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, conducting an official visit to the territory and implementing calls at a recent UN conference in New York for a two-state solution.

In a statement posted on social media on Monday, the ministry warned that more than two million Palestinians in Gaza are “living in a tight death circle of killing, starvation, thirst, and deprivation of medicine, treatment, and all basic human rights”.