MORE than 160 charities, including Christian Aid, Amnesty International, and Oxfam, have signed a statement appealing for the co-ordination of aid efforts in Gaza to be restored to the United Nations.

The letter, published on Tuesday, criticised the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which took over aid distribution at the end of May at the behest of the Israeli government.

“Four hundred aid-distribution points operating during the temporary ceasefire across Gaza have now been replaced by just four military-controlled distribution sites, forcing two million people into overcrowded, militarized zones where they face daily gunfire and mass casualties while trying to access food and are denied other life-saving supplies,” the statement said.

Since GHF took over aid distribution five weeks ago, more than 400 Palestinians have been killed while waiting for aid deliveries, the UN reports. There have been almost daily reports of such killings.

Last Friday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had deliberately fired at Palestinians near aid-distribution centres.

One soldier was quoted as saying of the people who gathered to collect aid: “They’re treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.”

The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that the accounts published by Haaretz were “malicious falsehoods”.

On Friday, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, described GHF’s distribution model as “inherently unsafe”, but on the same day, the GHF’s leader, the Revd Johnnie Moore, told the BBC World Service that it was “not true” that all the reported deaths were linked to his company’s operations.

Mr Moore is an Evangelical pastor and former adviser to Donald Trump. He has previously served on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The statement, published on Tuesday and signed by Christian charities, including Caritas, Islamic Relief Worldwide, and Pax Christi International, said that Palestinians in Gaza “face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families”.

“States must reject the false choice between deadly, military-controlled food distributions and total denial of aid,” the statement said, and take “concrete measures to end the suffocating siege” of Gaza.

On Wednesday, as the Church Times was going to press, President Trump announced on social media that Israel had “agreed to the necessary conditions” for a 60-day ceasefire.