Israeli strike kills Palestinians rushing for aid, toll over 30k
GAZA STRIP: A strike early Thursday on a crowd of Palestinians waiting for humanitarian aid in Gaza City killed at least 70 people, bringing the death toll since the start of the Israel-Hamas war to more than 30,000, health officials said.
A dire humanitarian crisis is unfolding in the war-torn territory, with food shortages greatest in the north of Gaza.
The Israeli army said it was “checking” the reports on the incident, while the United Nations’ humanitarian office OCHA said it was “familiar with the reports”.
A witness told AFP the violence unfolded at the Nabulsi roundabout in the western part of Gaza City, when thousands of people rushed towards the trucks.
“Trucks full of aid came too close to some army tanks that were in the area and the crowd, thousands of people, just stormed the trucks,” the witness said, declining to be named for safety reasons.
“The soldiers fired at the crowd as people came too close to the tanks.”
The health ministry in Gaza put the death toll at 70 and said 280 people were injured, their conditions ranging “from critical to serious”.
The death toll could eventually top 100, said ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra.
Aid groups say it has become nearly impossible to deliver humanitarian assistance in most of Gaza because of the difficulty of coordinating with the Israeli military, ongoing hostilities and the breakdown of public order, with crowds of desperate people overwhelming aid convoys.
The UN says a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians face starvation; around 80% have fled their homes.
In the wake of Thursday’s strike, medics found “dozens or hundreds” lying on the ground, according to Fares Afana, the head of the ambulance service at Kamal Adwan Hospital. He said there were not enough ambulances to collect all the dead and wounded and that some were being brought to hospitals in donkey carts.
The Al Jazeera network showed footage of several dead and wounded people being brought to another nearby hospital, Shifa, after the strike on a main road running along the Mediterranean coast.
Separately, the health ministry said the Palestinian death toll from the war has climbed to 30,035, with another 70,457 wounded.
Gaza is facing an increasingly desperate humanitarian situation nearly five months into the war that kicked off with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of around 1,160 people, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
The UN estimates that 2.2 million people — the vast majority of Gaza’s population — are threatened with famine, particularly in the north where destruction, fighting and looting make the delivery of food almost impossible.
According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, just over 2,300 aid trucks have entered the Gaza Strip in February, down by around 50% compared to January.
Thursday’s incident in Gaza City spurred a heated exchange at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, where Palestinian ambassador Ibrahim Mohammad Khraishi confronted his Israeli counterpart on the reported casualties.
“Are these human shields? Are these Hamas combatants?” Khraishi said.
Since launching its assault on Gaza following Hamas’ October 7 attack, Israel has barred entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies except for a trickle of aid entering the south from Egypt at the Rafah crossing and Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing. Despite international calls to allow in more aid, the number of supply trucks is far less than the 500 that came in daily before the war.