Updates: Israel kills 74 in Gaza as UN warns of high rate of child deaths

This live page is now closed.

For more coverage of the conflict, read our story about how Palestinian families face an agonising wait to find out about loved ones who never returned from aid distribution sites, here.

Learn about what starvation really means for the human body and for the people in Gaza, here.

Or find out how Israel’s demolitions in the occupied West Bank are trying to force Palestinians from their homes and lands here.

We will be closing this live page soon. But before we go, here’s a look at some of the day’s most important developments:

• UNICEF decried the scale of children being killed in Gaza, which it says averages out to 28 a day – “the size of a classroom”.
• Save the Children said 43 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women examined in its facilities in Gaza in the first half of July were malnourished.
• Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said “engineered starvation” and genocide is “a crime against humanity”, and urged an immediate intervention by the international community.
• The Israeli military said its strike on Khiam in the Nabatieh governorate of southern Lebanon has killed a member of Hezbollah.
• The Palestinian Authority slammed US House Speaker Mike Johnson’s visit to the illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel in the occupied West Bank.
• Israeli media said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will hold a security cabinet meeting on Tuesday, as he weighs the possibility of launching an operation to take full control of Gaza.

As Israel’s forced starvation tightens its grip on Gaza’s entire population, an increasing number of Palestinian families are frantically searching for news of relatives who undertook perilous journeys to get food from aid distribution points, never to return.

Khaled Obaid has been searching for his beloved son, Ahmed, for two months, scanning every passing vehicle on the coastal road in Deir-el-Balah, hoping against all odds that one of them might bring him home.

The boy had left the displaced family’s tent in the central town to find food for his parents and sister, who had lost her husband during the war, and headed to the Zikim crossing point, where aid trucks enter northern Gaza.

“He hasn’t returned until now. He went because he was hungry. We have nothing to eat,” the distraught father told Al Jazeera, breaking down in tears with his wife under the blue tarpaulin where they are sheltering.

Read more here.

Videos verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad Agency showed Israeli forces on Amman Street east of Nablus, while forces also stormed the village of Balata Al-Balad on the road leading to Joseph’s Tomb.

The Wafa news agency and activists on the ground said the actions appeared to be preparing for Israeli settlers to visit the tomb, which is considered a holy site for Muslims, Christians and Jews.

As we reported, the Israeli military announced an aid airdrop operation that involved the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, Germany, Belgium and Canada.

The Canadian government has now given more details about the assistance it contributed, saying it used a CC-130J Hercules aircraft to drop 21,600 pounds (about 9,797kg) of aid.

Humanitarian officials have said airdrops can be dangerous in densely populated Gaza, and are far less effective than land deliveries.

Almost two years in, the war in Gaza is the deadliest conflict for journalists ever.

With no foreign journalists allowed in, Palestinian reporters on the ground are the only ones who can tell the story to the world.

But they face death threats, attacks and now, even starvation.

In this episode, Al Jazeera journalist Hind Khoudary talks to The Take on how reporters in Gaza are doing their jobs amid such challenges:

Samah Matar is the mother of two boys – six-year-old Yousef and four-year-old Amir – who both have cerebral palsy.

Before the war, they required a special diet. Amid the shortages in aid, their weight has dropped dramatically.

Youseff weighed 14kg (31 pounds) before the war; now he weighs just 9kg (20 pounds). Amir weighed 9kg, but has dropped to less than 6kg (13 pounds).

“These children have special feeding needs. Now, there is no baby formula or diapers, and I can hardly find flour for them,” she told Al Jazeera. “Sugar, the main ingredient in their meals, is unavailable.”

“Before the war, their health was excellent. They were provided with special meals, fruits, vegetables and dairy products.”

Here’s what else Hamdan said in today’s message:

• Hamas treats Israeli captives “in accordance with the values and tolerant principles of Islam”.
• Israeli captives “are experiencing what the people of Gaza are experiencing”, he said.
• Israel “practises the most heinous forms of torture, brutal revenge, humiliation, and slow killing against our prisoners in its prisons”.
• The silence of the international community and UN institutions on Israel’s crimes “places political, moral and humanitarian responsibility on all of them”.
• Hamas is ready “to deal positively with any request from the Red Cross to bring food and medicine to the enemy’s prisoners in the Gaza Strip”.
• The group expresses “the necessity of forcing the occupation to open humanitarian corridors” into Gaza.

Merav Cohen of the centrist Yesh Atid party made the remarks in response to reports that Netanyahu is weighing launching a military assault to try to take full control of Gaza.

Netanyahu was set to make a final decision on the issue during a Security Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, according to Israeli media. It remained to be seen if the government was likely to move ahead with the plan.

Still, Cohen said that any plan to take full control of Gaza, including areas where Israeli captives are being held, would mean “we will bring our brothers back only in coffins”.

“Perhaps some kind of miracle will occur here, and the heroic soldiers will be able to save one or two people before the terrorists shoot them, but we will receive them only in coffins,” she said.

“We want them alive, we do not want them in coffins.”

In a statement, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry has said that the UN Security Council has “legal and moral responsibilities” to enforce “an immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.

“The ministry expresses deep concern over the continued obstruction of the Security Council’s role in protecting over two million Palestinians in Gaza, trapped in ongoing genocide, facing mass killing, starvation, and the denial of basic human rights,” said the statement.

It added that “continued delays in ending the war only serve to further plans of forced displacement against our people”.

As we’ve been reporting, the number of wounded during Israel’s war on Gaza has today reached at least 150,027.

But that figure does not indicate the true impact:

• At least 18,500 of those wounded will require long-term rehabilitation, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
• At least 4,700 have had one or more limbs amputated as a result of their injuries.
• That figure includes at least 1,000 children who have had their limbs amputated.
• Health workers have warned that malnutrition and unsanitary conditions are leading to regular complications for those wounded in the war.
• Meanwhile, as the death toll has reached at least 60,933, at least 44,500 children have lost at least one parent.

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan has released the latest message from the group, saying “engineered starvation” and genocide is “a crime against humanity”, while calling for an immediate intervention by the international community.

“[It] will remain a stigma that haunts all the supporters of the occupation and those who fail to prevent and stop it,” he said in a statement released by Hamas’ official Telegram channel.

Hamdan accused the US and other Western countries of “double standards” due to their difference in attitude towards the Palestinian prisoners and the Israeli captives.

He said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “bears full responsibility for the lives of all prisoners held by the resistance due to his intransigence, arrogance, and evasion of a ceasefire agreement, while escalating the war of extermination and starvation against our people”.

Aid agencies say the limited amount of aid Israel has allowed into Gaza in the last week is unlikely to avert the famine experts have warned about for months.

While at first most of the starvation-related deaths were among children and infants, increasingly, older people are succumbing to the hunger that Israel has imposed upon the enclave since March.

On Sunday, six more adults died from malnutrition, bringing the number of adults to die from hunger in Gaza to 82 over the last five weeks, when such deaths were first recorded.

Ninety-three children have also been killed by Israel through the man-made malnutrition it has imposed upon the enclave since its war began.

So, how does starvation happen? Are we seeing the whole picture?

Read our explainer here.

The Associated Press has published photos of Palestinians climbing on aid trucks along the Morag corridor near Rafah.

As we reported earlier, a United Nations spokesperson has said that aid deliveries remain scant, with most cargo “offloaded by the hungry crowds before reaching its destination”.

The collapse in a central authority in Gaza amid the war has further fuelled chaos.

The Zeitoun neighbourhood in Gaza City has been left in ruins after a 45-day Israeli military operation that flattened entire residential blocks.

Residents of the area in northern Gaza described it as the most destructive incursion yet.

“Their goal was only destruction, nothing at all but destruction,” one said.

Watch Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili report from amid the wreckage.