Wednesday, 27 May 2026
Getty image
Children killed collecting water in Israeli airstrike
GAZA CITY — Ten people, including six children, lost their lives in an Israeli airstrike on Sunday while waiting to collect water in central Gaza, according to emergency officials.
Their bodies were brought to Nuseirat’s al-Awda Hospital, where doctors also treated 16 wounded individuals, seven of whom were children.
Eyewitnesses told the BBC that a drone launched a missile at a crowd gathered near a water tanker with empty containers at the al-Nuseirat refugee camp.
Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported it has handled more mass casualty cases at its Rafah field hospital in the past six weeks than during the entire previous year.
Unverified video footage circulating online after the incident depicted bloodied children and lifeless bodies, accompanied by frantic screams and panic.
Locals rushed to the site and helped transport the injured using private cars and donkey carts.
This attack occurred amid a surge in Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip. A spokesperson for Gaza's Civil Defence Agency reported that 19 other Palestinians were killed on Sunday in three separate strikes on residential buildings in central Gaza and Gaza City.
The ICRC stated that its Rafah hospital received 132 patients with weapon-related injuries on Saturday, 31 of whom died.
According to the ICRC, a vast majority of the patients suffered gunshot wounds, and all conscious survivors said they had been trying to reach food distribution points.
The organization added that since May 27, when new food distribution sites opened, the hospital has treated more than 3,400 people wounded by weapons and recorded over 250 deaths, outpacing all mass casualty cases treated there in the previous year.
“These frequent and large-scale mass casualty incidents highlight the dire conditions civilians in Gaza are facing,” the ICRC said.
On Friday, the UN human rights office reported that 789 people had been killed in aid-related incidents.
Of those deaths, 615 occurred near the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) sites—which began operating on May 27 and are managed by US private security firms within military zones in southern and central Gaza. The remaining 183 were killed close to UN and other aid convoys.
The GHF has accused the UN of relying on “false and misleading” statistics from Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.
GHF head Johnnie Moore previously told the BBC he did not dispute fatalities near aid sites but argued that “100 percent of those casualties are being attributed to close proximity to GHF,” which he called “not true.”
On Saturday, Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza reported 24 deaths near a food distribution location, where witnesses claimed Israeli troops opened fire as people tried to collect food.
According to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, at least 57,882 people have been killed since then.