Sanaa Doghmah said her husband, Khaled, 36, was fatally shot in the head while trying to reach a distribution site in Rafah to collect food for their five children.
“He was going to get food for his children and himself, to make them live, feed them because they don’t have a pinch of flour at home,” Khaled’s aunt, Salwah, said at his funeral.
Hamas-led Palestinian factions said in a statement the new aid distribution sites had “turned into death traps” and called for the aid to be distributed through UN-affiliated agencies.
The GHF, which is providing aid under an Israeli initiative that is bypassing traditional relief agencies who say their deliveries into Israeli-blockaded Gaza have been restricted, said it had handed out 1.15 million meals across three sites in southern and central Gaza without incident on Sunday.
TRUCKLOADS OF FOOD
The US-based organisation said it was also piloting a direct-to-community model, delivering 11 truckloads of food to community leaders for distribution in areas north of Rafah.
“We are continuing to adapt and improve our operations to ensure the safety of the Palestinian people we aim to serve,” interim GHF Executive Director John Acree said in a statement.
GHF had handed out no aid on Saturday, accusing Hamas of making threats that “made it impossible” to operate in the enclave, which the Islamist group denied.
The GHF uses private American military contractors to operate its sites and has been accused of a lack of neutrality and independence by UN and other international humanitarian agencies. It has denied such accusations.
Israel relented to international pressure to allow limited U.N.-led operations to resume on May 19 after an 11-week blockade in the enclave of 2.3 million people, where malnutrition has become widespread. The UN has described aid let in so far as a “drop in the ocean”.
