Gaza Rescuers Say Israel Army Kills More Than 50 People Near Aid Site
Gaza's civil defence agency said Israeli forces on Tuesday killed more than 50 aid seekers in the southern city of Khan Yunis, the latest deadly incident near an aid site in the Palestinian territory.
The Gaza Strip has been ravaged by more than 20 months of war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas, with the situation continuing to deteriorate on the ground amid shortages of food, fuel and clean water.
Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that at least 53 people were killed and some 200 wounded as thousands of Palestinians gathered to receive flour at a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid centre in the morning.
"Israeli drones fired at the citizens. Some minutes later, Israeli tanks fired several shells at the citizens, which led to a large number of martyrs and wounded," he said.
The Israeli army said it was "aware of reports regarding a number of injured individuals from (Israeli military) fire following the crowd's approach" in Khan Yunis, and that the details of the incident were "under review".
It said that "a gathering was identified adjacent to an aid distribution truck that got stuck in the area of Khan Yunis, and in proximity to (Israeli) troops operating in the area."
Bassal said that four additional people were killed by Israeli fire Tuesday near the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
Israeli restrictions on media in the Gaza Strip and other difficulties in accessing some areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defence agency.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza reported that as a result of the incident, "51 martyrs and more than 200 injuries have arrived at Nasser Medical Complex, including 20 in critical condition".
In early March, Israel imposed a total aid blockade on the Gaza Strip amid an impasse in truce negotiations, only partially easing restrictions in late May.
The US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began distributing aid in late May, but its operations have been marred by chaotic scenes and dozens of deaths.
The UN's humanitarian agency OCHA said Monday that during recent aid distributions several children have been "temporarily separated from their families due to mass movements around militarised distribution points."
Workers raced to restore Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday, one of the last remaining functioning health facilities in Gaza's north, an area particularly hard-hit by the war.
They cleared piles of rubble out of the courtyard to make space for ambulances, breaking large chunks of concrete from a collapsed storey with sledgehammers.
Amer Abu Safiya, a patient at the hospital who suffered from a wound on his hand, told AFP there was little doctors could do to help him.
"Every day we are being bombed from the north to the south. Al-Ahli Hospital has been destroyed. Medical services are halted. As you can see, there's nothing to wrap around my hand, and there's no medication", he said, holding up his swollen hand while laying down on a makeshift bed in the hospital's backyard.
"We are reactivating the emergency department as well as the physiotherapy. This is important", Alessandro Maracchi, head of the UN Development Program's Gaza's office, told AFP.
OCHA further reported that its humanitarian partners in Gaza "continue to warn of the risk of famine in Gaza, amid catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity".
The war was triggered by an unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to official Israeli figures.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Monday that 5,194 people have been killed since Israel resumed strikes on the territory on March 18 following a truce.
The overall death toll in Gaza since the war broke out on October 7, 2023 has reached 55,493 people, according to the health ministry. Palestinians who were injured in Israeli fire as they gathered near a food aid centre, receive care at Khan Yunis' Nasser hospital AFP Smoke billows amid reported building detonations by Israeli forces to the east and north of Jabalia city in the northern Gaza Strip at dawn AFP
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Access to connectivity or information are limited and Ahmad often relies on a wide network of people he knows on the ground and calls them to verify any information for fact-checks or reaches out to journalists or medical staff. Some of the fact-checking requests that the Kashif team receives are related to a term coined "Pallywood," which refers to a disinformation campaign that accuses Palestinians of faking suffering and civilian deaths in their conflict with Israel. One particularly disturbing aspect of these claims involves accusations that images of deceased children are staged and show dolls rather than children. In such cases, the Kashif team relies on their network to contact the children's families for testimonies or photos of the children — in order to prove that the accusations of staging are false. "We were not able to respond to all those requests because we are a small team, that's why we decided to integrate a chatbot into our website," explains Riham Abu Aita. The "Kashif bot" responds to requests by users to fact-check specific information or answer questions. It functions as an interactive bot that is trained by the Kashif team and provides the users with verified and trusted information only. The bot makes sure that the users receive answers quickly, as the requests do not have to be responded to by individual team members. The Kashif bot also helps the team understand which topics are of interest to the users of Kashif. Riham Abu Aita co-founded Kashif, a Palestinian platform promoting media literacy and fighting misinformation through fact-checking and ethical journalism Image: DW Akademie "The process of building the chatbot was much more complicated than expected," recalls Riham Abu Aita. "It took us more than six months to make sure that the chatbot was treating our content properly. It was difficult to even find a chatbot provider, as most providers do not focus on Arabic language." So far, the performance of the chatbot has been satisfying; People are using it frequently and the team is continuing to train it. However, Abu Aita acknowledges that her team's fact-checking capabilities are constrained by the environment in which they operate. "Sometimes the public asks us for fact-checks that would need security or military information," she explains. "But we do not have access to such information." Lebanon: Battling disinformation on social media Another hotspot where false and misleading information circulates is in Lebanon. There, disinformation is mostly shared and spread among friends or family members on WhatsApp groups, with content and interactions peaking during times of crisis or events. To fight fire with fire, the fact-checking platform Sawab was initially founded as a WhatsApp group in 2022. During the 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria, disinformation spiked, and it became difficult for people to navigate, which brought the number of users in the Sawab WhatsApp group from a few hundred up to 2000 within only four or five months. During the earthquake, the number of AI-generated images circulating on WhatsApp was striking, such as the image of a dog sitting on top of the rubble under which a child's hand protrudes. Such images were likely spread to evoke sympathy or to gain traction or views. Due to the high demand for fact-checks, the Sawab team soon explored other social media channels and started their website in 2024. Just one of many images the Sawab team has identified as fake Image: Sawab Sawab has recently welcomed a special new member to its team of 14 part-time members: a virtual AI bot named VERIFAI that supports the team around the clock. The Sawab team was recently put to the test in the light of the high influx of disinformation emerging during the war in Gaza and the military escalation between Israel and Lebanon. The team members who commit to Sawab alongside full-time jobs or study commitments were simply not able to keep up with the amount of content. The VERIFAI Sawab bot now supports them on their mission of verifying news and combating hate speech. The VERIFAI bot assists the team in research, information gathering or specific editorial tasks while the team makes sure that the bot is given very precise instructions or reliable sources to use. However, the bot's contribution so far remains limited. "Until now, our virtual team member is not a fact-checker," explains Sawab's 22-year-old co-founder Youssef Al-Amin, a student at Doha Institute. "It is difficult to teach him (VERIFAI) how to use reliable sources. He still needs time to learn." The AI bot has been trained in Sawab's editorial style and platform-related specificities to be able to support its human team members in the best possible way. The bot was able to render some of the workflows more time efficient, which has helped other team members to free up and dedicate more of their time to fact-checking tasks. Youssef Al Amin, a Lebanese journalist and co-founder of Sawab, brings his fact-checking expertise to the stage at a DW Akademie conference in Tunis Image: DW Akademie The Sawab team has noticed that the bot still has significant limitations in its performance in Arabic language or its application in the Arabic context. "We still mostly use English prompts, as there are more mistakes made in Arabic. We also noticed that there is a lack of understanding on local realities on the ground, especially when the task concerns smaller communities or villages in Lebanon," recalls Al-Amin. One major caveat is that the bot would never admit to its own limitations or knowledge gaps, but would rather provide made-up answers, but with a strong degree of confidence. AI tools to detect misinformation such as AI generated images, also lag behind their English-language counterparts. "They are still bad at detecting AI-generated images. Every time the tools used to generate AI content improve, the more difficult our mission becomes, as the gap widens," explains Al-Amin. Election periods make it harder for users to spot disinformation online Image: Vahid Salemi/AP/picture alliance With municipal elections taking place in Lebanon in 2025 and parliamentary elections in 2026, the Sawab team anticipates a high rise in disinformation, as well as its spread by chatbots and on coordinated accounts, and has already started to prepare for what is yet to come. Fact-checkers from the Middle East operate in very specific country contexts, but there is one thing that unites them all: Giving up is not an option. They all do their best to respond to each request and deliver any fact-check demanded. Despite all the hardships and difficulties they face, they continue to do their work and follow ambitious aims. "We do whatever we can. We hope that the bot could help to reduce hate speech, incitement as well as gender-based disinformation," says Riham from Kashif. The Middle Eastern fact-checkers try to make the region a better and safer place through verified information: One step at a time — and now assisted by machine effort through their narrative detection tool, chatbots or even virtual team members. Jenna Kleinwort is a project manager in the Middle East and North Africa Department at DW Akademie and a member of the DW Akademie's Community of Practice on Artificial Intelligence. She holds an MSc in Economics of the Middle East from Marburg University. She wrote her thesis on Female Entrepreneurs in the United Arab Emirates, where she also worked as a reporter. Fluent in Arabic, Jenna has spent over seven years in North Africa and the Gulf region. She is also a 2023 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism.
