The Al Shaer family went to bed hungry at their home in Gaza City. An Israeli air strike killed them in their sleep.
The family – freelance journalist Wala Al Jaabari, her husband and their five children – were among more than 100 people killed in 24 hours of Israeli strikes or gunfire, according to health officials.
Their corpses lay in white shrouds outside their bombed home yesterday with their names scribbled in pen. Blood seeped through the shrouds as they lay there, staining them red.
“This is my cousin. He was 10. We dug them out of the rubble,” said Amr Al Shaer, holding one of the bodies after retrieving it.
Iman Al Shaer, another relative who lives nearby, said the family hadn’t eaten anything before the bombs came down. “The children slept without food,” he said.
Relatives said some neighbours were spared only because they had been out searching for food at the time of the strike.
Ten more Palestinians died overnight from starvation, the Gaza health ministry said, bringing the total number of people who have starved to death to 111, most of them in recent weeks as a wave of hunger crashes on the Palestinian enclave.
The United Nations and aid groups trying to deliver food to Gaza say Israel, which controls everything that comes in and out, is choking delivery, and Israeli troops have shot hundreds of Palestinians dead close to aid collection points since May.
“We have a minimum set of requirements to be able to operate inside Gaza,” Ross Smith, the director of emergencies at the UN World Food Programme, told Reuters. “One of the most important things I want to emphasise is that we need to have no armed actors near our distribution points, near our convoys.”
US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff will travel to Europe this week for meetings on Israel’s war in Gaza and a range of other issues, a US official said, adding Witkoff will continue pushing for a ceasefire in the Palestinian enclave.
Witkoff was expected to depart for Rome yesterday and arrive today for a meeting with Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer and a senior Qatari envoy.
If sufficient progress is made, Witkoff will travel from Rome to Doha toward the end of the week to secure a deal.
Israel will only grant one-month visas to UN’s international staff, Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon told the Security Council yesterday.
Brazil will intervene in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel’s actions in Gaza at the International Court of Justice, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters yesterday.
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