AT LEAST 38 Palestinians were killed today in new shootings in areas of food distribution centres supported by Israel and United States in the south of the Gaza Strip, the local Health Ministry said.

This was the highest death toll in the near-daily shootings that have slaughtered Palestinians attempting to reach the food centres run by the private contractor Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 

Two eyewitnesses said Israeli troops opened fire on the crowds of desperate Palestinians early on Monday.

There was no immediate comment by the Israeli military. 

Gaza’s Health Ministry said most of the dead were trying to reach the GHF centre near the southern city of Rafah and some were on the roads to a newly opened hub near Khan Younis.

Two Palestinians trying to get food at the Rafah site, Heba Jouda and Mohammed Abed, said Israeli forces fired on the crowds in the early morning at the Flag Roundabout. 

Israel and the US say without evidence that the new GHF system is needed to prevent Hamas from siphoning off aid. 

United Nations agencies and major aid groups, which have delivered humanitarian aid across Gaza since the start of the 20-month Israel-Hamas war, have rejected the new system, saying it can’t meet the territory’s needs and allows Israel to use aid as a weapon. They deny there is widespread theft of aid by Hamas.

Scores of people have been killed and hundreds wounded since the sites opened last month. Experts have warned that tens of thousands of Palestinians are already in the grip of famine. 

But protests against the severe humanitarian crisis are continuing to take place across the globe.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators in the Netherlands donned red clothing and marched Sunday to protest against the Dutch government’s policy toward Israel.

Protesters walked around the centre of The Hague to symbolically create the red line they say the government has failed to draw to halt Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

“I don’t want to be complicit in these horrendous crimes happening there and I want to speak out,” protester Marin Koning told reporters.

In neighbouring Belgium, around 75,000 people, many of them also clad in red, hit the streets in the capital Brussels, police said. 

The Dutch protest sent a “clear signal,” according to Marjon Rozema of Amnesty International Netherlands. Dutch officials must “act now, at both the national and international level, to increase the pressure on the Israeli government,” she said in a statement.