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Aid deliveries cross the border from Rafah to Gaza (symbolic image).
© Xinhua/Imago
There has been violence in Gaza surrounding an aid delivery - descriptions of the events are contradictory.
JERUSALEM - More than 100 people were killed on Thursday after a crowd stormed a rare humanitarian aid convoy in Gaza City, according to Gaza health authorities.
It was a chaotic incident that Palestinian officials and witnesses blamed on Israeli gunfire, while Israeli officials said it was a mass panic.
According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, which is controlled by the terrorist organization Hamas, more than 700 Palestinians were injured, while the death toll in the enclave rose to over 30,000.
Although many details of the deadly Gaza disaster during Israel's war were still unclear - especially the cause of the high death toll - the incident underscored the desperate plight of Gaza's civilian population.
It further complicated the difficult international efforts to reach a ceasefire in the Israel War.
War in Israel: mass exodus and increasing hunger
For months, aid and humanitarian organizations had warned that Gaza society was on the verge of collapse amid massive destruction of urban areas, mass exodus and increasing hunger.
This was the moment their warnings seemed prophetic.
Israeli forces released black-and-white drone footage showing hundreds of Palestinians rushing toward the slow-moving aid convoy;
Videos on social media showed a desperate crush in the darkness along al-Rashid Street in the southwestern part of Gaza City.
Descriptions of the events that followed were contradictory.
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War in Israel: Army denies attack on aid convoy
Palestinian officials said Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd, an account confirmed by eyewitnesses and doctors who said many of the dead and injured were brought in with gunshot wounds.
Israel disputed the number of casualties, saying the people died in a stampede and not from Israeli gunfire, which officials said was not aimed at the convoy.
Nir Dinar, head of the IDF's international press department, said there was "no IDF involvement" in the "multi-casualty" event.
He acknowledged that IDF soldiers at one end of the convoy fired at people who approached Israeli forces in a threatening manner, but he said the deaths were the result of a clash at the other end of the convoy.
“There was no IDF attack on these supplies,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a news conference late Thursday (Feb. 29).
“We have been carrying out a humanitarian operation of this kind for the last four nights without any problems.
This was the first night we had such an event”.
Hagari said the "unfortunate incident resulted in dozens of deaths and injuries in the Gaza Strip."
Another Israeli official said the incident was under investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
War in Israel: UN denounces lack of food for children
“A line for life-saving food became a line for death,” said Jason Lee, Save the Children’s country director in the occupied Palestinian territories.
“While children die for lack of food, their parents die trying to get it.
There must be an immediate, impartial investigation into what happened.”
The IDF said it coordinated the arrival of 38 trucks carrying aid from Egypt, delivered by private contractors.
The convoy was a rare sight in the north, the most devastated and isolated part of the Gaza Strip, where an estimated 300,000 people still live.
According to UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, one in six children under the age of 2 supported by aid agencies was acutely malnourished in January.
Aid deliveries to the enclave have fallen sharply in recent weeks after Israel began targeting Hamas-employed police officers who had been protecting the convoys, leaving them vulnerable to looting by criminal gangs and desperate civilians .
Israeli protesters have also blocked border crossings, further slowing the movement of aid supplies.
UN official accuses Israel of “using hunger as a method of war.”
The United Nations' top human rights official, Volker Turk, said on Thursday that Israel's blockade and siege of the Gaza Strip could amount to the "use of hunger as a method of war."
“In the north of the Gaza Strip, where the scope for humanitarian aid is almost nil, it is already suspected that many people are starving,” he added.
Avi Hyman, an Israeli government spokesman, said Thursday that 11,000 Hamas fighters had been killed and 2,000 captured during the war.
He estimates the group still has about 15,000 fighters in the field.
Hamas leaders are still at large, including Yehiya Sinwar, the suspected perpetrator of the October 7 attacks, who is believed to be hiding in a network of tunnels under the southern Gaza Strip.
According to the Israeli military, he is surrounded by a human shield of hostages, complicating efforts to capture or kill him and potentially end the war.
According to the United Nations, eighty-five percent of Gaza residents have been displaced from their homes.
Some 1.4 million displaced people are housed in the southern city of Rafah on the Egyptian border, which Israel has chosen as its next military target.
U.S. officials have urged Israel to develop an evacuation plan for trapped civilians before proceeding with the operation.
“Under the current circumstances and without due consideration of the safety of these refugees, we continue to believe that an operation in Rafah would be a disaster,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last week.
Without a ceasefire, about 58,000 additional deaths could be expected in the Gaza Strip over the next six months, most of them from traumatic injuries and infectious diseases, according to a February research study.
Loveluck and Harb reported from London.
Cate Brown in Washington and Hazem Balousha in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.
To the authors
Louisa Loveluck
is a London-based correspondent covering global crises.
From 2019 to 2023, she was the newspaper's Baghdad bureau chief.
Before that, she reported on the war in Syria from Beirut.
Miriam Berger
covers foreign news for The Washington Post from Washington, DC.
Before joining the Post in 2019, she lived in Jerusalem and Cairo and reported freelance from the Middle East and parts of Africa and Central Asia.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on March 1, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation and an abridged version to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.