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At least one civilian was killed and 48 wounded when Israeli troops opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians, after the group chosen by Israel to ship food into Gaza lost control of its distribution centre, health officials reported.
Witnesses said Israeli forces started shooting after crowds of Palestinians broke through the fences on Tuesday around the distribution site, as an Israeli military helicopter fired flares and bursts of gunfire were heard in the distance. In one video, a large crowd of panicked civilians, including women and children, can be seen running away from the distribution site, trampling the fencing.
Ajith Sunghay, the head of the UN human rights office for the Palestinian territories, said most of the injured people were hurt by gunfire. Gaza’s health ministry said at least one person was killed.
Israel imposed the blockade on all supplies in March, saying Hamas was seizing deliveries for its fighters, a charge the group denies. Earlier this month, a global hunger monitor said that half a million people in the Gaza Strip face starvation.
The 11-week siege and a continuing tight Israel blockade mean most people in Gaza are desperately hungry. Medics and aid workers in the devastated Palestinian territory have said for months that malnutrition is spreading, with bakeries operated by the UN World Food Programme shutting owing to a lack of cooking gas, and prices soaring for the limited amount of food available in shops and markets.
Earlier this month, the IPC estimated that nearly 71,000 children under the age of five were expected to be “acutely malnourished”, with 14,100 cases expected to be severe in the next 11 months.
On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of people walked through Israeli military lines to reach the new distribution centre in Rafah established by Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which has been authorised by Israel to take over food distribution operations and was reportedly not prepared, with staff at one point forced to abandon their posts.
In a statement, the foundation said: “At one moment in the late afternoon, the volume of people at the SDS [secure distribution centre] was such that the GHF team fell back to allow a small number of Palestinians in Gaza to take aid safely and dissipate.”
The Israeli military said it fired “warning shots” near the compound to restore control, but denied firing towards people.
The UN and other humanitarian organisations have rejected the new system, saying it would not be able to meet the needs of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and allowed Israel to use food as a weapon to control the population. They have also said there was a risk of friction between Israeli troops and hungry people seeking supplies.
The organisations added that a newly formed group had no experience and so would not be able to handle the logistics of feeding more than 2 million people in a devastated combat zone, a prediction that the dangerous scenes on Tuesday appeared to confirm.
The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), Philippe Lazzarini, said on Wednesday that the new – US-backed – distribution model was a waste of resources and a distraction from “atrocities”.
“We already have an aid distribution system that is fit for purpose,” Lazzarini said. “The humanitarian community in Gaza, including Unrwa, is ready. We have the experience and expertise to reach people in need. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking towards famine, so humanitarian [work] must be allowed to do its life-saving work now.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said on Tuesday that “there was some loss of control momentarily” at the distribution point, but that “happily, we brought it under control”. He repeated that Israel planned to move Gaza’s entire population to a “sterile zone” at the southern end of the territory while troops fought Hamas elsewhere.
On Sunday, Jake Wood, the founding director of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, resigned, saying it would not be possible for the group to deliver aid “while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence”.
The UN and other humanitarian organisations had already refused to work with the GHF on the grounds that doing so would compromise values that were key to reaching civilians in all conflict zones, and put at risk their teams and the recipients of aid in Gaza.
A group of NGOs, including ActionAid, this month said: “Aid that is used to mask ongoing violence is not aid, it is in fact humanitarian cover for a military strategy of control and dispossession.”
