At least three people have died and dozens have been injured in war-ravaged Gaza as thousands of starving Palestinians attempted to get food from a controversial Israeli-United States organisation, laying bare the scale of the catastrophe inflicted on the enclave by Israel’s three-month blockade of aid.
In punishing midday heat on Tuesday, thousands of Palestinians clambered over fences and pushed through packed crowds to reach life-saving supplies brought by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a new and controversial group tasked with the delivery of aid to Palestinians in the besieged enclave.
Amid the buzz of Israeli military helicopters overhead and gunfire rattling in the background, desperate crowds, including women and children, in southern Gaza’s Rafah area struggled to reach the food distribution point on the GHF’s first day of operation.
“We have been dying of starvation. We have to feed our children who want to eat. What else can we do? I could do anything to feed them,” a Palestinian father told Al Jazeera.
“We saw people running, and we followed them, even if it meant taking a risk, and it was scary. But fear is not worse than starvation.”
Apart from the deaths and injuries, several people also went missing in the ensuing stampede, officials in Gaza said, with the incident coming amid widespread hunger and relentless Israeli bombing of Palestinian civilians, including children.
“The occupation forces, positioned in or around those areas, opened live fire on starving civilians who were lured to these locations under the pretence of receiving aid,” Gaza’s Government Media Office said in a statement, adding that the incident “provides undeniable evidence of the Israeli occupation’s total failure in managing the humanitarian catastrophe it has deliberately created”.
“What happened today in Rafah is a deliberate massacre and a full-fledged war crime, committed in cold blood against civilians weakened by over 90 days of siege-induced starvation.”
In a statement earlier, the Israeli military said its forces did not direct gunfire towards the Palestinians but rather fired warning shots in an outside area. It claimed that control over the situation had been established and aid distribution would continue as planned.
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‘Reckless, inhumane plan’
The aid by GHF, a foundation backed by the US and endorsed by Israel, arrived in Gaza despite allegations that the new group did not have the experience or capacity to bring relief to more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza.
The United Nations and aid groups say the organisation does not abide by humanitarian principles and could serve to further displace people from their homes as Palestinians move to receive aid from a limited number of distribution sites.
UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said that seeing thousands of Palestinians storming the aid site was “heartbreaking“.
“We and our partners have a detailed, principled, operationally sound plan supported by member states to get aid to a desperate population,” he told reporters. “We continue to stress that a meaningful scale-up of humanitarian operations is essential to stave off famine and meet the needs of all civilians wherever they are.”
The chaos underscored the staggering level of hunger gripping Gaza. According to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report, 1.95 million people – 93 percent of the enclave’s population – are facing acute food shortages.
Aid groups have warned for months that Israel is using starvation in Gaza as a weapon of war.
“This is not how aid is done,” Ahmed Bayram, spokesperson for the Norwegian Refugee Council, told Al Jazeera, describing the scene in Rafah as the “inevitable consequence of a reckless and inhumane plan”.
“These are the scenes we have literally been warning about all month now. It spread chaos. It spread confusion. And this is the result,” he said.
“I think the best thing that can be done now is for this plan to be cancelled, to be reversed, and for us professional humanitarians in the UN and NGOs to do our job. There are tonnes and tonnes of aid waiting across the border. [It’s a] very simple decision: open the gates and keep them open.”
Israel made the GHF, a Swiss-based entity formed in February through back-channel meetings between Israeli-linked officials and business figures, a lead aid distributor. Meanwhile, Israel has blocked the UN and other international organisations from bringing in aid.
Despite being promoted as a neutral body, the GHF’s close ties to Israel and the US have prompted widespread condemnation. Its former head suddenly resigned this week, citing the foundation’s inability to uphold the core humanitarian principles of “neutrality, impartiality and independence”.
According to a report in The New York Times, the GHF emerged from “private meetings of like-minded officials, military officers and businesspeople with close ties to the Israeli government”.
Israel has said its forces are not involved in the physical distribution of aid, although it backs the system’s use of biometric screening, including facial recognition, to vet aid recipients. Palestinians fear it is another Israeli tool of surveillance and repression.
Critics have also warned that the GHF’s structure – and its concentration of aid in southern Gaza – could serve to depopulate northern Gaza, as planned by the Israeli military.
‘This is definitely not enough’
While the previous UN-led distribution network operated about 400 sites across the Strip, the GHF has set up only four “mega-sites” for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents.
In Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary reported that many of the food parcels being handed out were inadequate to sustain families.
Khoudary described a typical food box with 4kg (8.8lb) of flour, a couple of bags of pasta, two cans of fava beans, a pack of tea bags and some biscuits. Other food parcels contained lentils and soup in small quantities.
Although the GHF said it distributed about 8,000 food boxes on Tuesday, which it claimed amounted to 462,000 meals, Khoudary said the rations would barely sustain a single family for long.
“This is definitely not enough, and it is not enough for all the humiliation that Palestinians are going through to receive these food parcels,” she said.
