Israeli military denies shooting into large crowds of hungry people and says most were killed in crush or run over trying to escape
More than a hundred Palestinians were killed in the early hours of Thursday morning, Gaza health officials said, when desperate crowds gathered round aid trucks and Israeli troops opened fire, in an incident that the US president, Joe Biden, warned was likely to complicate ceasefire talks.
There were starkly different accounts of how the victims died in the chaos that took place near Gaza City in the north of the strip. Israel’s military denied shooting into large crowds of hungry people and said most were killed in a crush or run over by trucks trying to escape. Soldiers only fired at a small group that moved away from the trucks and threatened a checkpoint, a spokesperson said.
Witnesses and survivors described bullets hitting crowds around the aid trucks, and Mohammed Salha, acting director of the al-Awda hospital, which treated 161 casualties, said most appeared to have been shot.
Gaza health officials said at least 112 people were killed and 280 injured after Israeli forces opened fire on an aid distribution point. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said it was an “ugly massacre conducted by the Israeli occupation army on people who waited for aid trucks at the Nabulsi roundabout”.
Biden said the US was trying to determine what happened and that the loss of life would complicate efforts to broker a deal to stop fighting and release Israeli hostages, before the holy month of Ramadan, which starts on 10 March.
Hamas said the incident could jeopardise talks in Qatar. The group would not allow talks “to be a cover for the enemy to continue its crimes”, it said.
The death toll from Israeli attacks on Gaza has now passed 30,000. With more than 70,000 others injured, and thousands more uncounted victims buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings, nearly one in 20 of the prewar population of Gaza are now casualties of attacks.
The US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, said earlier on Thursday that more than 25,000 women and children had been killed by Israel since 7 October 2023, adding that Israel could and should do more to protect civilians.
The survivors are stalked by hunger, with “pockets of starvation” reported particularly in the north, and widespread malnutrition that has already killed some children. There are also severe shortages of medical supplies, clean water and shelter.
The desperation of crowds who died trying to reach the food aid underlined the extent of shortages in the north around Gaza City. UN officials have described a blockade within a blockade, with additional Israeli controls that make it even harder to get supplies into northern Gaza than the south.
One injured survivor, Kamel Abu Nahel, said he went to the aid distribution point in the middle of the night because he hoped for food supplies, after two months of eating animal feed.
After trucks arrived and a crowd gathered, Israeli soldiers opened fire, so people scattered to seek shelter but returned once the gunfire stopped, he told the AP news agency. However the troops opened fire again, and Abu Nahel was shot in the leg then run over by a truck that was speeding away.
There were so many wounded that some were taken to hospitals in donkey carts; videos shared on social media appeared to show medics walking beside one piled with victims. Hospital corridors were crowded with survivors and relatives.
The Israeli military spokesperson Lt Col Peter Lerner said most casualties were caused by a crush around some trucks in the convoy after they first passed the Israeli military checkpoint into northern Gaza.
Later, crowds chasing the final truck in the convoy turned and moved back towards the checkpoint, he said, prompting troops to fire warning shots, and then lethal rounds in self-defence. The Israeli military released footage of crowds round the trucks which it said showed the lethal crush but not the shooting incident.
Lerner declined to say how much time elapsed between the crush and the shooting, or estimate casualties in either, saying only he did not believe the Palestinian toll.
It was not clear who had supplied the trucks of food. The UN agency for Palestine, Unrwa, has not sent an aid convoy to northern Gaza since 5 February, when its trucks were attacked by the Israeli navy even though the delivery had been approved for transit. Lerner said he did not know who sent the aid.
There are thought to be about 300,000 people still living in northern Gaza, months after Israel ordered all civilians to leave.
Some were not able to travel, others feared they would not find a place to stay in the crammed shelters of the south, felt that with strikes all over Gaza they preferred to take their chances at home, or worried Israeli forces would not allow them to return if they headed south.
The deaths prompted fresh international demands for a ceasefire. The UN’s undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, said: “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”
Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said: “The tragic deaths in Gaza demand an immediate ceasefire to facilitate more humanitarian aid, the release of hostages and the protection of civilians.”
In the region, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan accused Israel of targeting civilians, and separately called for more aid to reach Gaza and greater international pressure on Israel to reach a ceasefire deal.
In February barely 100 trucks a day of aid had reached Gaza, just half the amount that got through in January, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of Unrwa, told journalists on a visit to Jerusalem.
And it is just a trickle compared with the 500 trucks that went in daily with food and medical aid before the war started in October. Then Gaza had a functioning economy, agriculture sector and commercial imports, with many people feeding themselves.
After Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and in which more than 200 people were kidnapped and taken to Gaza, Israel tightened a years-long blockade to halt entry of most food, water and medical supplies to Gaza. It says the controls on supplies are vital to its war on Hamas, and efforts to recover hostages.
With much of Gaza in ruins and the majority of its population displaced from their homes, almost everyone now relies on aid. Lazzarini described the restrictions as a siege that had brought the strip to the brink of an unprecedented human-made famine.
“What’s extraordinary in this conflict is the man-made widespread hunger and even looming starvation and famine in some pockets,” he said. “The type of situation or siege being imposed on the Gaza Strip since October 7 has led to a situation not seen anywhere else in the world.
“Within four or five months, suddenly we talk about a famine, which is absolutely easy to reverse because to reverse it depends only and exclusively on the proper political will.”
There have been airdrops of food aid in recent days into parts of Gaza. But while these could work well for specialised medical equipment and other needs, Lazzarini said, they were an “extraordinarily expensive” way to deliver food that could not be scaled up to address the levels of hunger in Gaza.
Israel says that it does not impose limits on aid shipments into Gaza, and blames the logistical failures of UN agencies and humanitarian organisations for failing to process and distribute enough aid.