The number of victims from Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip continues to increase and this Thursday reached at least 30,035 dead and 70,457 injured, reported the Ministry of Health of the enclave, controlled by the Islamist group Hamas.
However, these figures do not include the at least 104 dead and 700 injured, according to the same health authorities, caused by an Israeli attack this Thursday morning against Gazans who were crowding the distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza City, the main city in the north of the territory and where half a million inhabitants are at risk of suffering from famine, because UN aid trucks barely arrive due to obstructions by the military, according to the United Nations and other NGOs.
Israel confirmed that Israeli troops opened fire on “several people” in a crowd surrounding aid trucks after feeling threatened, an Israeli source told Reuters. In a statement, the Israeli military said dozens of people were injured by pushing and trampling as they tried to access aid trucks. He also indicated that the incident was being reviewed.
The emergency director of Al Shifa Hospital in this city, Amjad Aliwa, told France Presse that at least 50 people were killed and 120 injured after Israeli troops fired on a crowd of “thousands of citizens” who rushed towards the Humanitarian aid trucks at the “Nablus roundabout”, west of Gaza City. The director of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza City, Hussam Abu Safieyah, reported that he had received 10 bodies and dozens of injured patients from the incident west of the city. “We don’t know how many there are in other hospitals,” Safieyah told Reuters by phone.
Medical teams could not cope with the volume and severity of the wounds of dozens of wounded who arrived at Al Shifa, the enclave’s Ministry of Health reported.
According to images spread on social networks, at least one of the trucks transporting aid was used to load dead or injured Palestinians.
Hamas warned in a statement that the incident could lead to the failure of talks being held in Qatar to reach an agreement on a truce and the release of hostages. This “atrocious massacre in Gaza, unprecedented in the history of war crimes, is part of (Israel’s) war of hunger and displacement against our people,” Hamas denounced today in a statement, in which it encouraged Arab countries to demonstrate against the war in the enclave that has already lasted 146 days.
The UN estimates that 2.2 million people, the vast majority of Gaza’s population, are threatened by famine, particularly in the north, where destruction, fighting and looting make food delivery almost impossible. No humanitarian group had been able to deliver aid to this area since January 23, the World Food Program warned on Tuesday.
According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), just over 2,300 aid trucks entered the rest of the Gaza Strip in February, a drop of around 50% from January, and a daily average of about 82 trucks per day. According to the same source, around 500 trucks entered the Gaza Strip on average daily before the start of the war on October 7, when the needs of the local population were least.
Palestinians in Gaza confessed to France Presse in recent days that they were being forced to eat leaves or livestock fodder, or even sacrifice draft animals for food.
The head of the UN humanitarian aid coordination office for the Palestinian Territories, Andrea De Dominico, recently told the same agency that on several occasions, when food convoys arrived north from Gaza, “thousands of people had blocked the trucks to unload them, at the risk of being shot.
