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29-05-2025
RAFAH/ GAZA: At least three people have died and dozens have been injured in war-ravaged Gaza as thousands of starving Palestinians attempted to get food from a controversial Israeli-United States organization, laying bare the scale of the catastrophe inflicted on the enclave by Israel’s three-month blockade of aid.
In punishing midday heat on Tuesday, thousands of Palestinians clambered over fences and pushed through packed crowds to reach life-saving supplies brought by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a new and controversial group tasked with the delivery of aid to Palestinians in the besieged enclave.
Amid the buzz of Israeli military helicopters overhead and gunfire rattling in the background, desperate crowds, including women and children, in southern Gaza’s Rafah area struggled to reach the food distribution point on the GHF’s first day of operation.
“We have been dying of starvation. We have to feed our children who want to eat. What else can we do? I could do anything to feed them,” a Palestinian father told media.
“We saw people running, and we followed them, even if it meant taking a risk, and it was scary but fear is not worse than starvation.”
Apart from the deaths and injuries, several people also went missing in the ensuing stampede, officials in Gaza said, with the incident coming amid widespread hunger and relentless Israeli bombing of Palestinian civilians, including children.
“The occupation forces, positioned in or around those areas, opened live fire on starving civilians who were lured to these locations under the pretense of receiving aid,” Gaza’s Government Media Office said in a statement, adding that the incident “provides undeniable evidence of the Israeli occupation’s total failure in managing the humanitarian catastrophe it has deliberately created”.
“What happened today in Rafah is a deliberate massacre and a full-fledged war crime, committed in cold blood against civilians weakened by over 90 days of siege-induced starvation.”
In a statement earlier, the Israeli military said its forces did not direct gunfire towards the Palestinians but rather fired warning shots in an outside area. It claimed that control over the situation had been established and aid distribution would continue as planned.
‘Reckless, inhumane plan’
The aid by GHF, a foundation backed by the US and endorsed by Israel, arrived in Gaza despite allegations that the new group did not have the experience or capacity to bring relief to more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza.
The United Nations and aid groups say the organization does not abide by humanitarian principles and could serve to further displace people from their homes as Palestinians move to receive aid from a limited number of distribution sites.
UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said that seeing thousands of Palestinians storming the aid site was “heartbreaking“.
“We and our partners have a detailed, principled, operationally sound plan supported by member states to get aid to a desperate population,” he told reporters. “We continue to stress that a meaningful scale-up of humanitarian operations is essential to stave off famine and meet the needs of all civilians wherever they are.”
The chaos underscored the staggering level of hunger gripping Gaza. According to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report, 1.95 million people 93 percent of the enclave’s population are facing acute food shortages. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
