At least 57 people were killed in Gaza over the past 24 hours, many killed while seeking aid as well as by Israeli airstrikes, with ceasefire talks appearing to have hit a dead end amid a worsening starvation crisis.

Many were shot dead as they were waiting for trucks carrying aid close to the Zikim crossing into Israel . It has become common for hungry crowds to gather and wait for aid trucks to enter Gaza as mass starvation spreads, which humanitarians widely blame on Israel’s blockade on the territory.

At least 124 people have died from starvation in Gaza, 84 of them children, the Palestinian news agency reported. On Saturday morning, an infant died from malnutrition, the third baby to die in 24 hours from hunger.

Israeli strikes killed more people across the Gaza Strip, including four people in an apartment building in Gaza City on Saturday.

The killings come as ceasefire talks have appeared to stall, with the US and Israel withdrawing their negotiating teams from Doha on Thursday. The US president, Donald Trump, blamed Hamas for the collapse in talks, saying that he did not think the group wanted a deal.

0:46 Trump says Hamas doesn’t want to make a deal – video

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Friday that he was considering “alternative options” to ceasefire discussions, without elaborating what those options could be.

Hamas officials have rebuffed claims that they are to blame for the haltering ceasefire talks, and instead have dismissed the Israeli and US withdrawal as a negotiating tactic. Egypt and Qatar, which are mediating the talks, suggested talks could resume soon.

“Trump’s remarks are particularly surprising, especially as they come at a time when progress had been made on some of the negotiation files,” the senior Hamas official Taher al-Nunu told AFP.

The break in talks came after Hamas gave its response to an earlier ceasefire proposal. The two parties are at odds over where Israeli troops would be stationed during the ceasefire, as well as aid access in Gaza and the number of Palestinian prisoners exchanged for Israeli hostages.

As ceasefire talks have dragged on, Gaza’s population has suffered from mass starvation. More than 90,000 women and children were in “urgent need” of treatment for malnutrition, with one in three people in Gaza going for days without eating, the World Food Programme warned.

Rania al-Sharahi, a 44-year-old mother of six who is pregnant, said she has lost 22 kg, despite her pregnancy. She struggles to find food for her children, who are often forced to scrounge for water and beg for scraps of food from neighbours.

“As for bread, we don’t even talk about it any more. It has become a luxury. We haven’t had any in over 10 days. I dream of eating something sweet, anything sugary that might give me some energy,” Sharahi said.

Her husband and children do not go to aid distribution points run by the private US Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), where more than 1,000 people have been killed while trying to get aid in the past two months. Sharahi and her children are at the mercy of the kindness of strangers and do not know when or from where their next meal will come.

“I see my children every day suffering from hunger and searching for water. How am I supposed to feel? Our tears have dried from crying so much,” Sharahi said.

Israel has downplayed the starvation crisis, suggesting a coordinated media campaign is tarnishing its image. It has said aid is waiting to be distributed but blames the UN for failing to do so.

The UN has said that distributing aid in Gaza has become impossible owing to the litany of restrictions Israel puts on the organisation. It also said the majority of their requests to distribute aid are rejected by Israel and complain of regular delays by Israel to respond to their requests.

Israel has boasted that it has let in 4,500 aid lorries into Gaza since ending its total blockade on the strip in May. But this amounts to about 70 truckloads each day, a number the UN says is inadequate and a far cry from the prewar total of 500 each day.

Israel has come under immense global pressure as images of starving babies are circulated around the world. It has said it will allow airdropped aid to resume for the first time in months. Jordan, which will conduct airdrops, said it will be dropping mostly food and milk formula.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, said he was “working urgently” with Jordan to get British aid into Gaza, as he comes under increasing pressure to recognise a Palestinian state.

The head of Unrwa, the main UN agency serving Palestinians, Philippe Lazzarini criticised the airdrops, calling them a “distraction”.

“Airdrops will not reverse the deepening starvation. They are expensive, inefficient and can even kill starving civilians. It is a distraction and screensmoke,” Lazzarini said in a post on X.

France announced on Thursday that it would recognise a Palestinian state at the UN general assembly in September, a move meant as a show of public disapproval towards Israeli actions in Gaza. France is expected to try to rally other European nations to also recognise the Palestinian state before the assembly.

On Saturday, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said Italy would not recognise the Palestinian state, suggesting it would be “counterproductive”.

“I am very much in favour of the state of Palestine but I am not in favour of recognising it prior to establishing it,” Meloni told Italian newspaper La Republica.

Nearly 60,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched a military operation there in response to the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023 which killed about 1,200 people.

A mother pressed a final kiss to what remained of her five-month-old daughter and wept. Esraa Abu Halib’s baby now weighed less than when she was born.

On a sunny street in shattered Gaza, the bundle containing Zainab Abu Halib represented the latest death from starvation after 21 months of war and Israeli restrictions on aid.

The baby was brought to the pediatric department of Nasser Hospital on Friday. She was already dead. A worker at the morgue carefully removed her Mickey Mouse-printed shirt, pulling it over her sunken, open eyes. He pulled up the hems of her pants to show her knobby knees. His thumb was wider than her ankle. He could count the bones of her chest.

The girl had weighed over 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) when she was born, her mother said. When she died, she weighed less than 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds).

A doctor said it was a case of “severe, severe starvation.”

She was wrapped in a white sheet for burial and placed on the sandy ground for prayers. The bundle was barely wider than the imam’s stance. He raised his open hands and invoked Allah once more.

She needed special formula

Zainab was one of 85 children to die of malnutrition-related causes in Gaza in the past three weeks, according to the latest toll released by the territory’s Health Ministry on Saturday. Another 42 adults died of malnutrition-related causes in the same period, it said.

“She needed a special baby formula which did not exist in Gaza,” Zainab’s father, Ahmed Abu Halib, told The Associated Press as he prepared for her funeral prayers in the hospital’s courtyard in the southern city of Khan Younis.

Dr. Ahmed al-Farah, head of the pediatric department, said the girl had needed a special type of formula that helps with babies allergic to cow’s milk.

He said she hadn’t suffered from any diseases, but the lack of the formula led to chronic diarrhea and vomiting. She wasn’t able to swallow as her weakened immune system led to a bacterial infection and sepsis, and quickly lost more weight.

‘Many will follow’

The child’s family, like many of Gaza’s Palestinians, lives in a tent, displaced. Her mother, who also has suffered from malnutrition, said she breastfed the girl for only six weeks before trying to feed her formula.

“With my daughter’s death, many will follow,” she said. “Their names are on a list that no one looks at. They are just names and numbers. We are just numbers. Our children, whom we carried for nine months and then gave birth to, have become just numbers.” Her loose robe hid her own weight loss.

The arrival of children suffering from malnutrition has surged in recent weeks, al-Farah said. His department, with a capacity of eight beds, has been treating about 60 cases of acute malnutrition. They have placed additional mattresses on the ground.

Another malnutrition clinic, affiliated with the hospital, receives an average of 40 cases weekly, he said.

“Unless the crossings are opened and food and baby formula are allowed in for this vulnerable segment of Palestinian society, we will witness unprecedented numbers of deaths,” he warned.

Doctors and aid workers in Gaza blame Israel’s restrictions on the entry of aid and medical supplies. Food security experts warn of famine in the territory of over 2 million people.

‘Shortage of everything’

After ending the latest ceasefire in March, Israel cut off the entry of food, medicine, fuel and other supplies completely to Gaza for 2 ½ months, saying it aimed to pressure Hamas to release hostages.

Under international pressure, Israel slightly eased the blockade in May. Since then, it has allowed in around 4,500 trucks for the U.N. and other aid groups to distribute, including 2,500 tons of baby food and high-calorie special food for children, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said last week. Israel says baby formula has been included, plus formula for special needs.

The average of 69 trucks a day, however, is far below the 500 to 600 trucks a day the U.N. says are needed for Gaza. The U.N. says it has been unable to distribute much of the aid because hungry crowds and gangs take most of it from its arriving trucks.

Separately, Israel has backed the U.S.-registered Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which in May opened four centers distributing boxes of food supplies. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since May while trying to get food, mostly near those new aid sites, the U.N. human rights office says.

Much of Gaza’s population now relies on aid.

“There was a shortage of everything,” the mother of Zainab said as she grieved. “How can a girl like her recover?”

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Magdy reported from Cairo.

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Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

International pressure was mounting on Saturday for alternative ways to be found to deliver food to hungry Palestinian civilians in Gaza, with Britain vowing to back airdrops.

The UK decision to support the plans of regional partners Jordan and the United Arab Emirates came as pro-Palestinian activists piloted a symbolic aid vessel towards the shores of Gaza in defiance of an Israeli naval blockade.

On the ground, the territory’s civil defence agency said at least 40 more Palestinians had been killed in Israeli military strikes and shootings.

Humanitarian chiefs are deeply sceptical that airdrops can deliver enough food to tackle the deepening hunger crisis facing Gaza’s more than two million inhabitants and are instead demanding that Israel allow more overland convoys.

But British Prime Minister Keir Starmer backed the idea, vowing to work with Jordan to restart airdrops — and with France and Germany to develop a plan for a lasting ceasefire.

An Israeli official told AFP on Friday that airdrops in Gaza would resume soon, adding they would be conducted by the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

Starmer’s office said that in a call with his French and German counterparts, the “prime minister set out how the UK will also be taking forward plans to work with partners such as Jordan to airdrop aid and evacuate children requiring medical assistance”.

The United Arab Emirates said it would resume airdrops “immediately”.

“The humanitarian situation in Gaza has reached a critical and unprecedented level,” Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan said in a post on X. “Air drops are resuming once more, immediately.”

A number of Western and Arab governments carried out air drops in Gaza in 2024, at a time when aid deliveries by land also faced Israeli restrictions, but many in the humanitarian community consider them ineffective.

“Airdrops will not reverse the deepening starvation. They are expensive, inefficient and can even kill starving civilians,” said Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

Israel imposed a total blockade on the entry of aid into Gaza on March 2 after talks to extend a ceasefire in the now 21-month-old conflict broke down. In late May, it began to allow a trickle of aid to enter.

Israel’s military insists it does not limit the number of trucks going into the Gaza Strip, and alleges that UN agencies and relief groups are not collecting the aid once it is inside the territory.

But humanitarian organisations accuse the Israeli army of imposing excessive restrictions, while tightly controlling road access within Gaza.

A separate aid operation is under way through the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, but has faced fierce international criticism after Israeli fire killed hundreds of Palestinians near distribution points.

On Saturday, pro-Palestinian activist group Freedom Flotilla said its latest aid boat, the Handala, was approaching Gaza and had already got closer than its previous vessel, the Madleen, which was intercepted and boarded by Israeli forces last month.

The Israeli military said it was monitoring the situation and was prepared to enforce what it called its “legal maritime security blockade”.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli fire killed 40 people on Saturday, including 14 killed in separate incidents near aid distribution centres.

One of the 14 was killed “after Israeli forces opened fire on people waiting for humanitarian aid” northwest of Gaza City, the agency said.

Witnesses told AFP that several thousand people had gathered in the area.

Abu Samir Hamoudeh, 42, said the Israeli military opened fire while people were waiting to approach a distribution point near an Israeli military post in the Zikim area, northwest of Sudaniyah.

The Israeli military told AFP that its troops fired “warning shots to distance the crowd” after identifying an “immediate threat”.

It added that it was not aware of any casualties as a result of the fire.

Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties in accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify tolls and details provided by the civil defence agency and other parties.

Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza after Hamas’s October 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

The Israeli campaign has killed 59,733 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Pro-Palestinian activists gather on the dockside in Italy earlier this month to watch the Hamdala set sail for Gaza in a symbolic bid to breach Israel’s blockade. (Credit: AFP)

Washington: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump appeared on Friday to abandon Gaza ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, both saying it had become clear that the Palestinian militants did not want a deal.

Netanyahu said Israel was now mulling “alternative” options to achieve its goals of bringing its hostages home from Gaza and ending Hamas rule in the enclave, where starvation is spreading and most of the population is homeless amid widespread ruin.

Trump said he believed Hamas leaders would now be “hunted down”, telling reporters at the White House: “Hamas really didn’t want to make a deal. I think they want to die. And it’s very bad. And it got to be to a point where you’re going to have to finish the job.”

The remarks appeared to leave little to no room, at least in the short term, to resume negotiations to pause the fighting, at a time when international concern is mounting over worsening hunger in war-shattered Gaza.

French President Emmanuel Macron, responding to the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, announced overnight that Paris would become the first major Western power to recognise an independent Palestinian state.

Britain and Germany said they were not yet ready to do so but later joined France in calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Trump dismissed Macron’s move. “What he says doesn’t matter,” he told reporters at the White House. “He’s a very good guy. I like him, but that statement doesn’t carry weight.”

Israel and the United States withdrew their delegations on Thursday from the ceasefire talks in Qatar, hours after Hamas submitted its response to a truce proposal.

Sources initially said on Thursday that the Israeli withdrawal was only for consultations and did not necessarily mean the talks had reached a crisis. But Netanyahu’s remarks suggested Israel’s position had hardened overnight.

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff said overnight Hamas was to blame for the impasse, and Netanyahu said Witkoff had got it right.

Senior Hamas official Basem Naim said on Facebook that the talks had been constructive, and criticised Witkoff’s remarks as aimed at exerting pressure on Israel’s behalf.

“What we have presented – with full awareness and understanding of the complexity of the situation – we believe could lead to a deal if the enemy had the will to reach one,” he said.

Mediators Qatar and Egypt said there had been some progress in the latest round of talks. They said suspensions were a normal part of the process and they were committed to continuing to try to reach a ceasefire in partnership with the U.S.

The proposed ceasefire would suspend fighting for 60 days, allow more aid into Gaza, and free some of the 50 remaining hostages held by militants in return for Palestinian prisoners jailed in Israel.

It has been held up by disagreement over how far Israel should withdraw its troops and the future beyond the 60 days if no permanent agreement is reached.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister in Netanyahu’s coalition, welcomed Netanyahu’s step, calling for a total halt of aid to Gaza and complete conquest of the enclave, adding in a post on X: “Total annihilation of Hamas, encourage emigration, (Jewish) settlement.”

MASS HUNGER

International aid organisations say mass hunger has now arrived among Gaza’s 2.2 million people, with stocks running out after Israel cut off all supplies to the territory in March, then reopened it in May but with new restrictions.

The Israeli military said on Friday it had agreed to let countries airdrop aid into Gaza. Hamas dismissed this as a stunt.

“The Gaza Strip does not need flying aerobatics, it needs an open humanitarian corridor and a steady daily flow of aid trucks to save what remains of the lives of besieged, starving civilians,” Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office, told Reuters.

Gaza medical authorities said nine more Palestinians had died over the past 24 hours from malnutrition or starvation. Dozens have died in the past few weeks as hunger worsens.

Israel says it has let enough food into Gaza and accuses the United Nations of failing to distribute it, in what the Israeli foreign ministry called on Friday “a deliberate ploy to defame Israel”. The United Nations says it is operating as effectively as possible under Israeli restrictions.

United Nations agencies said on Friday that supplies were running out in Gaza of specialised therapeutic food to save the lives of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

The ceasefire talks have been accompanied by continuing Israeli offensives on the ground. Palestinian health officials said Israeli airstrikes and gunfire had killed at least 21 people across the enclave on Friday, including five killed in a strike on a school sheltering displaced families in Gaza City.

In the city, residents carried the body of journalist Adam Abu Harbid through the streets wrapped in a white shroud, his blue flak jacket marked PRESS draped across his body. He was killed overnight in a strike on tents housing displaced people.

Mahmoud Awadia, another journalist attending the funeral, said the Israelis were deliberately trying to kill reporters. Israel denies intentionally targeting journalists.

Israel launched its assault on Gaza after Hamas-led fighters stormed Israeli towns near the border, killing some 1,200 people and capturing 251 hostages on October 7, 2023. Since then, Israeli forces have killed nearly 60,000 people in Gaza, health officials there say, and reduced much of the enclave to ruins.

(Reporting by Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem, Steve Holland in Washington and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo; writing by Peter Graff and Mark Heinrich; editing by Alison Williams, Toby Chopra, Philippa Fletcher)

Israel is pursuing an extensive PR effort to remove itself from blame for the starvation and killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is responsible.

As dozens of governments, UN organisations and other international figures have detailed Israel’s culpability, officials and ministers in Israel have attempted to suggest that there is no hunger in Gaza, that if hunger exists it is not Israel’s fault, or to blame Hamas or the UN and aid organisations for problems with distribution of aid.

The Israeli effort has continued even as one of its own government ministers, the far-right heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, appeared to describe an unapologetic policy of starvation, genocide and ethnic cleansing that Israel has denied and said is not official policy.

Amid evidence of a growing number of deaths from starvation in Gaza, including many child deaths, and shocking images and accounts of malnutrition, Israel has tried to deflect blame for what has been described by the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) as “man-made mass starvation”.

That view was endorsed in a joint statement this week by 28 countries – including the UK – which explicitly blamed Israel. “The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths,” the statement said. “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazan’s of human dignity.

View image in fullscreen Palestinians gather to receive food from a charity in Gaza City on Friday. Photograph: Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters

“We condemn the drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”

Some Israeli officials have been marginally more cautious in public statements, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has promised vaguely that there “will be no starvation” in Gaza.

But a recent off-the-record briefing for journalists by a senior Israeli security official has pushed a more uncompromising position, stating that there “is no hunger in Gaza” and claiming that images of starving children on front pages around the world showed children with “underlying diseases”.

David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesperson, told Sky News this week: “There is no famine in Gaza – there is a famine of the truth.”

Contradicting that claim, Médecins Sans Frontières said a quarter of the young children and pregnant or breastfeeding mothers it had screened at its clinics last week were malnourished, a day after the UN said one in five children in Gaza City were suffering from malnutrition.

Israel’s attempts to deflect blame, however, are undermined by its single and overarching responsibility: that as an occupying power in a conflict, it is legally obliged to ensure the provision of means of life for those under occupation.

And while Israel has consistently tried to blame Hamas for intercepting food aid, that claim has been undermined by a leaked US assessment, seen by Reuters, which found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group of US-funded humanitarian supplies.

Examining 156 incidents of theft or loss of US-funded supplies reported by US aid partner organisations between October 2023 and May 2025, it said it found “no reports alleging Hamas” benefited from US-funded supplies.

Israel has also recently intensified efforts to blame the UN for the problems with aid distribution, citing a “lack of cooperation from the international community and international organisations”. Israel’s claims are contradicted by clear evidence of its efforts to undermine aid distribution.

Despite international warnings of the humanitarian risks posed by banning Unrwa, the main UN agency for Palestinians and the organisation with the most experience in Gaza, from Israel, its operations were closed down, complicating aid efforts.

Instead Israel, backed by the US, has relied on the private, inexperienced and controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; its sites have been the focus of numerous mass killings of desperate Palestinians by Israeli soldiers.

Israel’s attempts to hamper with aid efforts have continued. Last week it said it would not renew the work visa of Jonathan Whittall, the most senior UN aid official in Gaza; and a UN spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told reporters on Thursday that Israel had rejected eight of the 16 UN requests to transport humanitarian aid in Gaza the previous day.

He added that two other requests, initially approved, led to staff facing obstruction on the ground as he described a pattern of “bureaucratic, logistical, administrative and other operational obstacles imposed by Israeli authorities”.

All of which has injected a new sense of urgency into the catastrophe in Gaza as UN agencies warned that they were on the brink of running out of specialised food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children.

“Most malnutrition treatment supplies have been consumed and what is left at facilities will run out very soon if not replenished,” a WHO spokesperson said on Thursday.

More starvation deaths appear inevitable.