Gaza Strip (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – World leaders called on Friday for an investigation and a ceasefire nearly five months into the Gaza war, a day after dozens of desperate Palestinians were killed rushing an aid convoy.
President Joe Biden announced that the United States would start to deliver relief supplies from the air into Gaza, as some of its Arab and European allies have already been doing, in a bid to get aid into hard-to-reach areas.
Israeli troops opened fire as Palestinian civilians scrambled for food supplies during a chaotic melee on Thursday which the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry said killed more than 100 people in Gaza City.
The deaths came after a World Food Programme official had warned: “If nothing changes, a famine is imminent in northern Gaza.”
The Israeli military said a “stampede” occurred when thousands of Gazans surrounded the convoy of 38 aid trucks, leading to dozens of deaths and injuries, including some who were run over.
An Israeli source acknowledged troops had opened fire on the crowd, believing it “posed a threat”.
Gaza’s health ministry called it a “massacre” and said 115 people were killed and more than 750 wounded.
A UN team, who visited some of the wounded in Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital on Friday, saw a “large number of gunshot wounds”, UN chief Antonio Guterres’s spokesman said.
The hospital received 70 of the dead and treated more than 700 of the wounded, of whom around 200 remained in the hospital at the time of the team’s visit, spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
“I’m not aware that our team examined the bodies of people who were killed.My understanding from what they saw in terms of the patients who were alive getting treatments is that there was a large number of gunshot wounds,” he said.
The aid convoy deaths helped push the total number of Palestinian war dead in Gaza to 30,228, mostly women and children, according to the ministry’s latest toll.
The war began on October 7 with an unprecedented Hamas attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people, mostly civilians, Israeli figures show.
Israel’s military says 242 soldiers have died in Gaza since ground operations began in late October.
– US to ‘insist’ on more aid –
“The Israeli army must fully investigate how the mass panic and shooting could have happened,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock wrote on social media platform X.
Her French counterpart Stephane Sejourne said “there will have to be an independent probe to determine what happened”.
European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said “every effort must be made to investigate what happened and ensure transparency”.
Aerial footage of the incident made clear “just how desperate the situation on the ground is”, a US State Department spokesman said, adding that Washington was pushing Israel to allow in more aid.
Despite warnings from within his own administration that air drops “are a drop in the bucket” compared to the needs, Biden said Washington would start deliveries from the sky “in the coming days”.
He said he would also “insist” that Israel let in more aid trucks.
Biden said Thursday’s aid convoy deaths happened because Gazans were “caught in a terrible war, unable to feed their families — and you saw the response when they tried to get aid”.
The aid convoy deaths dealt a blow to efforts to broker a new truce in Gaza to get more aid in and the remaining Israeli hostages released by their Palestinian captors.
Militants took about 250 hostages, 130 of whom remain in Gaza, including 31 that Israel says are presumed dead.
Asked whether the convoy incident would complicate the truce negotiations, Biden said: “I know it will”.
Late on Thursday, he spoke with the leaders of Egypt and Qatar, the two Arab states which have been acting as go-betweens alongside the United States.
They discussed the “tragic and alarming” aid incident in Gaza, saying it “underscored the urgency of bringing negotiations to a close as soon as possible,” the White House said.
– ‘Peace or eternal war’ –
Accounts conflicted on what exactly unfolded in Gaza City.
A witness, declining to be named for safety reasons, said the violence began when thousands of people rushed towards aid trucks, leading soldiers to open fire when “people came too close” to tanks.
Hossam Abu Safiya, director at Gaza City’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, said all the casualties admitted there were hit by “bullets and shrapnel from occupation forces”.
Israeli armed forces spokesman Daniel Hagari said troops had fired “a few warning shots” to try to disperse a “mob” that had “ambushed” the aid trucks.
“Thousands of Gazans” swarmed the trucks, “violently pushing and even trampling other Gazans to death, looting the humanitarian supplies,” he said.
It is not the first time that aid convoys have been looted in northern Gaza, where residents have been reduced to eating animal fodder to stave off starvation.
The health ministry said four more children had died of “malnutrition and dehydration” at Gaza City’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, taking the number of such deaths to 10.
Hamas’s military wing said seven of the hostages still held in Gaza had died because of Israeli military operations, an announcement AFP could not independently confirm.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under increasing pressure over the captives.
On Friday, relatives and supporters rallied outside the US embassy branch in Tel Aviv in a call for help to secure their release.
At another protest in the city on Thursday night, Alon Lee Green, 36, said things were at a crossroads.
“Either we are going into an eternal war that will never stop or we’re going to a diplomatic agreement, an Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
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© 2024 AFP
