Shawdesh Desk:

Health officials in Gaza said Israeli air strikes in two neighbourhoods of Gaza City on Saturday killed at least 24 people and wounded several others.

At least 20 people were killed in a strike on a house in Al-Tuffah neighbourhood, while a strike in Al-Shati refugee camp claimed the lives of four others, Gaza civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Basal told AFP.

Doctor Mahmud Aliwa of Al-Ahli hospital said 24 bodies were brought to the facility after the strikes.

‘Israeli aircraft bombed a residential complex in Al-Shati camp … we recovered bodies of four victims,’ Basal said.

‘Our crews also recovered 20 martyrs and more than 35 wounded people … after the occupation planes targeted a house of the Shabat family in Al-Tufah.’

Basal said at least 19 people who were working at a factory in Al-Tufah were still missing.

Days after Israel announced a daily pause in fighting on a key route to allow more aid into Gaza, chaos in the besieged Palestinian territory has left vital supplies piled up and undistributed in the searing summer heat.

‘The breakdown of public order and safety is increasingly endangering humanitarian workers and operations in Gaza,’ the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, said in a briefing late Friday.

‘Alongside the fighting, criminal activities and the risk of theft and robbery has effectively prevented humanitarian access to critical locations.’

Israel offensive in Gaza has killed at least 37,551 people.

With civil order breaking down in Gaza, the UN says it has been unable to pick up any supplies from Kerem Shalom since Tuesday, leaving crucial aid in limbo.

A deputy UN spokesman this week said the crossing ‘is operating with limited functionality, including because of fighting in the area’.

William Schomburg, International Committee of the Red Cross chief in Rafah, said arranging lorries from the Egyptian side in particular was complicated.

‘It’s not just a question of civil order, but also the fact that you often have to cross battlefields,’ he said in an online briefing, adding that the area near Kerem Shalom had been hostile.

Aid agencies have instead pointed to Israel’s offensive on the southern city of Rafah, which pushed out more than a million people and closed a border crossing with Egypt, as a deepening humanitarian crisis hampered relief efforts.

Schomburg described Rafah City as a ‘ghost town’.

‘It is a ghost town in the sense that you see very few people, high levels of destruction, and really just another symbol of the unfolding tragedy that has become Gaza over the last nine months,’ he said.

The UN food agency has said its aid convoys have been looted inside Gaza by ‘desperate people’.

As both sides stall, it is the civilians in Gaza who are paying the price.

‘We don’t see any aid. Everything we get to eat comes from our own money and it’s all very expensive,’ said Umm Mohammad Zamlat, 66, from northern Gaza but now living in Khan Yunis in the south.

‘Even agencies specialised in aid deliveries are not able to provide anything to us,’ she added.

NGO Doctors Without Borders said on Friday that six trucks with 37 tons of supplies, mostly essentially medical items, have been held up at the Egyptian part of Kerem Shalom since June 14.