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01-03-2024
GAZA CITY: At least 112 Palestinians are said to have been killed and 760 injured trying to get desperately needed aid in Gaza.
Crowds descended on a convoy of Lorries on the coastal road south-west of Gaza City, in the presence of Israeli tanks.
Israel’s military say tanks fired warning shots but did not strike the convoy. Some Palestinians say troops fired directly at them.
A Palestinian witness told media most of those who died had been run over as lorry drivers tried to move forward.
Israeli aerial footage shows hundreds of people on and around Lorries, while graphic videos posted online show bodies loaded on to emptied aid Lorries and a donkey cart.
Giving the figures of 112 dead and 760 injured, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry accused Israel of a “massacre”.
The UN Security Council has scheduled a closed-door emergency meeting to discuss the incident.
France said “fire by Israeli soldiers against civilians trying to access food” was “unjustifiable” and US President Joe Biden expressed concern the incident would complicate efforts by mediators to broker a temporary ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas.
The medical charity MSF said it was “horrified” and called for an “immediate and sustained ceasefire”.
The incident came hours before Gaza’s health ministry announced that more than 30,000 people, including 21,000 children and women, had been killed in Gaza since the start of the current conflict on 7 October. Some 7,000 were missing and 70,450 were injured, it said.
The UN is warning of a looming famine in the north of the territory, where an estimated 300,000 people are living with little food or clean water.
The Israeli military launched a large-scale air and ground campaign to destroy Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist organization by Israel, the UK and others – after its gunmen killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 253 hostages.
Thursday’s incident took place shortly after 04:45 (02:45 GMT) at the Nabulsi roundabout, on the south-western edge of Gaza City.
A convoy of 30 lorries carrying Egyptian aid was making its way north along what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) described as a “humanitarian corridor” when it was surrounded by civilians, with people climbing on to the trucks.
“Some began violently pushing and even trampling other Gazans to death, looting the humanitarian supplies,” said the IDF’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm Daniel Hagari. “The unfortunate incident resulted in dozens of Gazans killed and injured.”
Israeli tanks, he said, “cautiously tried to disperse the mob with a few warning shots” but pulled back “when the hundreds became thousands and things got out of hand”. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
