GAZA: Hundreds of Palestinians arrived at an aid distribution station early on Thursday morning, desperate for food amid the impending famine, only to be met by Israeli troops opening fire.
The health ministry reported that almost 760 people were injured in the horrific event, which has been termed as a massacre that claimed at least 104 lives.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of Palestine, denounced the incident, which resulted in the greatest number of civilian casualties in recent weeks, calling it a “ugly massacre conducted by the Israeli occupation army on people who waited for aid trucks at the Nabulsi roundabout.”
The war had been going on for almost five months, and only hours ago, the death toll had surpassed 30,000.
Divergent accounts emerged regarding the precise cause of Thursday’s fatalities. Israel maintained that a significant number of the deceased were crushed by truck drivers who were overpowered by others attempting to steal the supplies.
Israeli officials did, however, acknowledge to AFP that the Israeli forces on the scene fired because they believed the people around the vehicles posed a “threat.”
Among the injured was a young Palestinian man who described chaotic scenes.
As he lay on the filthy, packed floor of Kamal Adwan Hospital awaiting treatment, the man told AFP, “There were crowds of people, but the occupation (forces) kept firing towards us.”
According to Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesman for Gaza’s health ministry, physicians at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City were “unable to deal” with the influx of fatalities “because of weak medical and human capacities.”
In February, little over 2,300 relief trucks entered the Gaza Strip, a decrease of over 50% from January, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
Compared to the roughly 500 trucks that entered each day prior to the war, that is an average of far fewer than 100 trucks every day. According to an AFP witness, people rushed the trucks at the Nabulsi junction on Thursday due to this exact shortage.
Israel announced on Wednesday that a convoy of thirty-one trucks had arrived in northern Gaza on Tuesday night and that the UN was in charge of distributing them. However, UN-OCHA stated that no UN agency was involved.
The Israeli military released aerial footage of numerous individuals approaching a line of moving trucks on foot.
The witness, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, claimed that “trucks full of aid came too close to some military tanks that were in the region and the crowd, which included thousands of individuals, just stormed the trucks.”
“When people approached the tanks too closely, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd.”
