Israel has blocked most aid from entering Gaza since March, with the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation taking over its distribution since May. At least 1,000 people have been killed seeking food from GHF and aid convoys since then, the U.N. Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA) estimates. Israel has previously disputed the number of casualties.
“The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible,” EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said on Tuesday, noting she spoke with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar to “make clear the [Israel Defense Forces] must stop killing people at distribution points.”
Kallas and von der Leyen’s statements come as foreign ministers across Europe and the Commonwealth area accused Israel of denying assistance to the civilian population in Gaza in a joint statement on Monday. Twenty EU countries, alongside the U.K., Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid Hadja Lahbib signed on to the statement.
In a post on X, Sa’ar said the countries behind the statement had made a “mistake … part of them out of good intentions and part of them out of an obsession against Israel.” Sa’ar added he had spoken to Kallas and told her Hamas was responsible for “deliberately creating friction between the civilian population, the aid distribution centers and the IDF.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot also demanded on Tuesday that Israel let journalists into Gaza, a day after the journalists’ association at newswire Agence France-Presse said their colleagues in Gaza were starving to death.
Health crisis spirals
“This is not hunger, this is not malnutrition. This is forced starvation, this is torture,” Saira Hussain, a British-Australian doctor currently working in Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, said.