“He went to get food for his daughters – and came back dead,” said Nahla Wafi who lost a son and had relatives injured on Sunday.
Hossam Wafi had travelled with his brother and nephew to a newly established distribution centre in the southern city of Rafah.
“They were just trying to buy (flour). But the drone came down on them,” his mother said, as she tried to comfort four of her granddaughters in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis.
Israel has faced growing condemnation over the humanitarian crisis in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, where the United Nations has warned the entire population faces the risk of famine.
‘Go there and get bombed’
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that its field hospital in Rafah received 179 cases on Sunday, including 21 pronounced dead on arrival.
The ICRC said that all those wounded “said they had been trying to reach an aid distribution site”, and that “the majority suffered gunshot or shrapnel wounds”.
Israeli authorities and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US and Israeli-backed outfit that runs the distribution centres, denied any such incident took place.
The military instead said that troops fired “warning shots” at people who approached them one kilometre away from the Rafah distribution site before dawn.
A witness told AFP thousands of people gathered at the area, known locally as the Al-Alam junction, between 2:00 and 4:00 am (2300 GMT and 0100 GMT) in the hopes of reaching the distribution centre.
At Nasser Hospital, Hossam Wafi’s young daughters called out for their father, kissing his body wrapped in a white shroud, before it was taken away.
Outside the hospital, dozens of men stood in silence before the body, praying. Some cried as the remains were taken away, one of them holding the father’s face until he was gently pulled away.
His uncle, Ali Wafi, told AFP he felt angry his nephew was killed while trying to get aid.
