At least 37 Palestinians were killed on Monday in new shootings in Gaza near food distribution centres run by private US contractors guarded by Israeli troops, local authorities said.
Witnesses blamed the shootings on Israeli troops who opened fire early in the morning as crowds of hungry Palestinians converged on two hubs managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private organisation that recently began operating in Gaza with Israeli and US support.
The death toll on Monday was the highest yet reported in the near-daily shootings since the GHF began operations three weeks ago.
Health officials in Gaza said most of Monday’s victims were killed while trying to reach the GHF centre near the southern city of Rafah, which has largely been razed by the Israeli military, and close to a second GHF centre in central Gaza. It said four other people were killed elsewhere.
Two Palestinians trying to get food at the Rafah site, Heba Jouda and Mohammed Abed, told the Associated Press that Israeli forces fired on the crowds at about 4am at the Flag roundabout. The traffic circle, hundreds of metres from the GHF centre, has repeatedly been the scene of shootings.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Monday its field hospital in Gaza had received 200 patients, marking the highest number received by the facility in one mass casualty incident.
On Sunday, the same hospital treated 170 people, many of whom “were wounded by gunshots, and who reported that they were trying to access a food distribution site”.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been forced to travel long distances and to cross Israeli military-controlled areas in Gaza, often at night, in a desperate and hazardous effort to get food packages from the new centres.
The Israeli military has designated specific routes to access the food hubs, and GHF has warned Palestinians that leaving the roads is dangerous, but many do so in an attempt to get to the scarce food first.
Aid officials said GHF and the Israeli military often give conflicting advice about access to the distribution sites, leading thousands to attempt to access the hubs through zones that are supposedly still off-limits. At least one incident early on Monday morning occurred some distance from a GHF site before it opened.
The Israel Defense Forces claimed that an initial inquiry suggested the toll reported by local authorities was not accurate.
It said in a statement: “Despite warnings that the area is an active combat zone, overnightseveral attempts were made by suspects to approach IDF troops who were operating in the area of Rafah, posing a danger to them. IDF troops operated in order to remove the threat and prevent the suspects from approaching them, and fired warning shots.”
Israel hopes the GHF will replace the previous comprehensive system of aid distribution run by the United Nations, which Israeli officials claim allowed Hamas to steal and sell aid. Aid agencies deny this, saying their tracing systems are robust.
UN agencies and major aid groups, which have delivered humanitarian aid across Gaza since the start of war, have rejected the new system, saying it is impractical, inadequate and unethical. They deny there is widespread theft of aid by Hamas.
Palestinian health officials say scores of people have been killed and hundreds wounded since the sites opened last month.
A tight blockade on all supplies entering Gaza was imposed by Israel throughout March and April, threatening many of the 2.3 million people who live there with “a critical risk of famine”. The GHF’s provisions so far have been grossly inadequate, humanitarian officials in the devastated territory said.
On Sunday, GHF said it had distributed 36,000 food boxes, totalling more than 2.1m meals.
In Geneva, Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said Israel’s near 20-month offensive in Gaza was inflicting “horrifying, unconscionable suffering” on Palestinians and urged government leaders to “wake up” and exert pressure to bring an end to the conflict.
“The facts speak for themselves,” said Türk at the opening of the latest human rights council session on Monday.
“Everyone in government needs to wake up to what is happening in Gaza. All those with influence must exert maximum pressure on Israel and Hamas, to put an end to this unbearable suffering.”
Türk has repeatedly spoken out about bloodshed in Gaza and called for the release of more than 50 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas and other armed Palestinian militants there.
The Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva responded by accusing Türk and his office of being “relentless in making irresponsible and uneducated statements regarding Israel’s conduct of hostilities – including reliance on information propagated by terrorist organisations”.
It called on Türk to “condemn Hamas’s declared strategy to maximise harm to the population in Gaza”.
