– and none lived more than two months.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement its field hospital in Rafah received 179 casualties including women and children, 21 of them declared dead upon arrival, the majority with gunshot or shrapnel wounds. It was unclear if any of the dead were militants.“All patients said they had been trying to reach an aid distribution site,” the ICRC said, calling it the highest number of “weapon-wounded” people in a single incident since the hospital was set up over a year ago.

The head of the World Food Program, Cindy McCain, told ABC News that staffers on the ground were reporting people killed and called it a “tragedy.”“Aid distribution has become a death trap,” the head of the United Nations, Philippe Lazzarini, said in a statement.

In a separate statement, Israeli military chief of staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir ordered that more aid sites be established — and that troops’ ground operation be expanded in unspecified parts of northern and southern Gaza.on crowds near the foundation’s sites. Before Sunday, 17 people were killed while trying to reach them, according to Zaher al-Waheidi, head of the Gaza Health Ministry’s records department.

The foundation says private security contractors guarding its sites have not fired on crowds. Israel’s military has acknowledged firing warning shots on previous occasions.

The foundation said in a statement it distributed 16 truckloads of aid early Sunday “without incident,” and dismissed what it described as “false reporting about deaths, mass injuries and chaos.”Health secretaries have typically delivered a clear message urging the public to get vaccinated during outbreaks, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, a former deputy director at the CDC who retired after 33 years at the agency in 2021.

President Donald Trump and his first-term health secretary, Alex Azar, urged people to get shots during news conferences in 2019, when measles ripped through Brooklyn and infected more than 1,200 nationwide.“You don’t necessarily need the secretary of health to attend a funeral, OK, but you don’t want to have mixed messages on vaccines,” Schuchat said. “Someone in a federal building in Washington can do a lot of harm from the way that they are messaging.”

Local leaders have largely been left alone to urge the public to take up vaccinations.Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has not urged the public to get vaccinated, either. He has not held any news conferences about the outbreak and posted just once on social media about measles since January. Any statements about the illnesses, which have also put 56 people in the hospital at some point, have been left to his aides.