“Right now, nearly 180,000 pallets of food and other life-saving aid stand ready to enter Gaza, the hungriest place on earth,” OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke told UN News.

He added that the supplies have already been paid for by the world’s donors, pointing out that “it is cleared for customs, approved and ready to move”.

“We can get the aid in – immediately, at scale and for as long as necessary,” he said, noting that time is running out very quickly, and lives are being lost every hour in the Gaza Strip.

He affirmed that the UN has a successful plan, as was evident during the ceasefire when tens of thousands of trucks entered the blockaded Strip and delivered aid to every person.

Aid agencies have warned about the risk of famine among the besieged enclave’s more than 2 million population.

The Israeli Army, dismissing international calls for a ceasefire, has pursued a devastating offensive in Gaza since October 2023, killing over 54,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

The updated toll on Wednesday comes a day after a harrowing video showed thousands of starving Palestinians rushing to get aid, with many of them herded into cage-like lines, from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution point in Rafah in southern Gaza.

In a statement, the Government Media Office said Israeli forces “opened direct fire on hungry Palestinian civilians who had gathered to receive aid” at the distribution site, wounding at least 62 people.

It was not immediately clear exactly how many incidents of gunfire occurred or on which days the 10 Palestinians were fatally shot, but there were deaths on both days.

“These locations were transformed into death traps under the occupation’s gunfire,” the media office added, decrying the killings as a “heinous crime”.

For its part, the GHF announced it had opened a second of a planned four aid distribution sites in Gaza on Wednesday.

The centres are part of an aid delivery scheme that has been roundly condemned by United Nations officials and the humanitarian community, who have repeatedly said that life-saving aid could be adequately and safely scaled up in Gaza if Israel would allow access to aid and let those organisations that have decades of experience handle the flow.

Speaking earlier in the day, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, decried the US-backed delivery model as a “distraction from atrocities” and called on Israel to allow the UN-backed humanitarian system to “do its life-saving work now”.

The message was echoed by several members of the UN Security Council during a meeting in New York discussing the conflict, with Algeria, France and the United Kingdom among those appealing for Israel to allow unfettered aid deliveries.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, said Israel was using “aid as a weapon of war”.

As the debate over aid access raged, Israel’s punishing attacks continued across Gaza, with rights observers warning of an even worsening humanitarian situation.

At least 63 people were killed in Israeli attacks since the early hours of Wednesday, according to medical sources speaking to Al Jazeera Arabic, bringing the death toll since October 7, 2023, to at least 54,084 Palestinians, with more than 123,308 wounded.

The ministry added that only 17 hospitals in Gaza remained partially functioning, with critical shortages of essential medicines and oxygen supplies.