27 Palestinian aid workers fatally shot by Israeli forces as they tried to deliver food
At least 27 Palestinian aid workers are dead and over 100 are wounded after Israeli forces gunned them down on their way to a Rafah distribution site.
At least 27 Palestinians are dead after Israeli forces fired upon people heading toward an aid distribution site on Tuesday.
Three children and two women are among the casualties, according to Mohammed Saqr, the head of nursing at Nasser Hospital. Most of the patients brought in were suffering from gunshot wounds, hospital director Atef al-Hout said.
Tuesday's incident was the third in just three days. In this one, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said they fired "near a few individual suspects" who left the designated route. The IDF claims they approached their forces and ignored warning shots.
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Shootings like the one on Tuesday have become nearly daily, especially after an Israeli and U.S.-backed foundation established aid distribution points inside Israeli military zones — a system Israel says is designed to circumvent Hamas.
The U.N. has rejected the new system, however, saying it doesn't address Gaza's mounting hunger crisis. It also allows Israel to use aid as a weapon.
The IDF said it was looking into reports of casualties after the incident on Tuesday. It previously said it fired warning shots at suspects who approached its forces early Sunday and Monday, when health officials and witnesses said 34 people were killed.
The military denies opening fire on civilians or blocking them from reaching aid sites. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which operates the sites, says there has been no violence in or around them, but on Tuesday acknowledged that the Israeli military was investigating whether civilians were wounded "after moving beyond the designated safe corridor and into a closed military zone, an area that was branded "well beyond our secure distribution site."
Each of the shootings occurred at the Flag Roundabout, which is around 1,000 yards from one of the GFH's distribution sites in southern city of Rafah, which is now mostly uninhabited.
The whole area is an Israeli military zone where journalists have no access outside of army-approved embeds. A witness, Yasser Abu Lubda, a 50-year-old who was displaced from Rafah, said the shooting began at around 4 a.m. local time on Tuesday. He said he saw several people killed or wounded.
The Israeli fire was "indiscriminate," according to Neima al-Aaraj, a woman from Khan Younis who also witnessed the shooting. She added that when she managed to reach the distribution site, there wasn't any aid left. "After the martyrs and wounded, I won’t return," she said. "Either way, we will die."
Another witness, Rasha al-Nahal, said, "There was gunfire from all directions," adding that she counted more than a dozen dead and several more wounded along the road.
She also found that there was no aid left when she reached the distribution site, so she gathered pasta from the ground and salvaged rice from a bag that had been dropped and trampled upon. "We'd rather die than deal with this," she said. "Death is more dignified than what's happening to us."
The U.N. Human Rights Council has since condemned the shooting. Both the Gaza Health Ministry — which is controlled by Hamas — and a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross, confirmed the toll, stating that its field hospital in Rafah received 184 wounded people, 19 of whom were declared dead upon arrival, while eight more later died of their wounds. All 27 who died were transfered to Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Younis.
"Palestinians have been presented the grimmest of choices: die from starvation or risk being killed while trying to access the meagre food that is being made available through Israel’s militarized humanitarian assistance mechanism," Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said 21 truckloads of food were distributed at the Rafah site on Tuesday, whlie its other two operational sites were closed.
During the ceasefire earlier this year, 600 aid trucks entered Gaza daily. Most of the roughly 2 million people living in the territory are almost completely reliant on international aid due to Israel's offensive, which has destroyed nearly all of Gaza's food production capabilities.
Tuesday's attack against the Palestinian aid workers came a day after three IDF soldiers were killed in northern Gaza in an explosion near the Jabaliya area.
All were in their 20s. It's been dubbed the deadliest attack on Israel's forces since the country broke the ceasefire in March. No further details were provided about that incident.
