Twelve-year-old Ahmed Zidan’s adolescence has been defined by genocide and starvation. Israeli forces had already bombed his family’s home in Gaza, killed his older brother, and displaced his family a second time when, one month ago, they shot Ahmed’s mother while she was seeking sustenance for her seven living children.

“Israel killed my mother,” Ahmed told The Intercept. “We were waiting at the U.S. aid distribution point in Rafah.”

Ahmed’s mother was one of the more than 400 Palestinian people who have been gunned down by Israeli forces in a particularly brutal new phase of the country’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza. After the Israeli military, powered by U.S. bombs, destroyed Gaza’s food supplies and choked daily life to a halt, the government cut off the flow of crucial aid to the people it was starving. The move has forced hungry Palestinians to a limited set of Israeli and U.S.-run aid distribution points. These places have become the sites of dozens of daily murders.

“For six days before my mother was killed on June 3, she, my sister Mirvat, and I would walk to the U.S. aid distribution point in Rafah every evening, leaving our tent at 7:00 p.m. and waiting until dawn for food,” Ahmed told The Intercept. “The Israeli army surrounded........

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