Gaza City, Gaza - Gaza's civil defense agency said Israeli forces opened fire on crowds of Palestinians trying to collect humanitarian aid in the war-torn Palestinian territory on Sunday, killing 93 people and wounding dozens more.

Eighty were killed as truckloads of aid arrived in the north, while nine others were reported shot near an aid point close to Rafah in the south, where dozens of people lost their lives just 24 hours earlier.

Four were killed near another aid site in Khan Younis, also in the south, agency spokesperson Mahmud Basal told AFP.

The UN World Food Programme said its 25-truck convoy carrying food aid "encountered massive crowds of hungry civilians which came under gunfire" near Gaza City, soon after it crossed from Israel and cleared checkpoints.

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Israel's military disputed the death toll and claimed soldiers had fired warning shots "to remove an immediate threat posed to them" as thousands gathered near Gaza City.

Israeli killings of civilians seeking aid have become a regular occurrence in Gaza, as the Palestinian people facing chronic shortages of food and other essentials flock in huge numbers to aid centers.

The UN said earlier this month that nearly 800 Palestinians seeking aid had been killed since late May, including on the routes of aid convoys.

In Gaza City, Qasem Abu Khater (36) told AFP he had rushed to try to get a bag of flour but instead found a desperate crowd of thousands and "deadly overcrowding and pushing."

"The tanks were firing shells randomly at us and Israeli sniper soldiers were shooting as if they were hunting animals in a forest," he added. "Dozens of people were martyred right before my eyes and no one could save anyone."

The WFP condemned violence against civilians seeking aid as "completely unacceptable."

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Israel on Sunday withdrew the residency permit of head of the OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) office in Israel, Jonathan Whittall, who has repeatedly condemned the humanitarian conditions in Gaza.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, in a post to X, accused him of spreading lies about the war on Gaza.

Whittall, a South African who lives in Jerusalem and frequently visits the Gaza Strip, has repeatedly condemned the humanitarian conditions for the more than two million people living in the Palestinian territory.

In April, he said Gazans were "slowly dying" due to the effects of Israel's assault.

Israel has slaughtered at least 58,895 Palestinians since October 2023, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

Separately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday expressed his supposed regret to Pope Leo XIV after what he described as a "stray" munition killed three people sheltering at the Holy Family Church in Gaza City.

Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

At the end of the Angelus prayer on Sunday, the pope slammed the "barbarity" of the Gaza war and called for peace, days after the Israeli strike on the territory's only Catholic church.

The strike was part of the "ongoing military attacks against the civilian population and places of worship in Gaza," the pope added.

The Catholic Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, held mass at the Gaza church on Sunday after traveling to the devastated territory in a rare visit on Friday.

Most of Gaza's population of more than two million people have been forcibly displaced at least once, and there have been repeated evacuation calls across large parts of the coastal enclave.

On Sunday morning, the Israeli military told residents and displaced Palestinians sheltering in the Deir el-Balah area to move south immediately due to imminent attacks in the area.

Whole families were seen carrying what few belongings they have on packed donkey carts heading south.

"They threw leaflets at us and we don't know where we are going and we don't have shelter or anything," one man told AFP.

The displacement order was "another devastating blow to the already fragile lifelines keeping people alive across the Gaza Strip," the UN OCHA said on Sunday.

According to the aid agency, 87.8% of Gaza is now under displacement orders or within Israeli militarized zones, leaving "2.1 million civilians squeezed into a fragmented 12 per cent of the Strip, where essential services have collapsed."