More than 100 Palestinians were killed trying to get aid

More than 100 Palestinians were killed and more than 250 were wounded in Gaza City early Thursday morning as they tried to access desperately needed aid. Eyewitness accounts point to Israeli troops opening fire on the crowd, though Israeli statements blame a stampede for the casualties.

Food, clean water, and other basic goods are nearly impossible to come by throughout Gaza due to ongoing Israeli military operations and the extreme destruction the past four months of war have wrought. Overall, humanitarian aid to Gaza has been extremely limited not only because of the difficult on-the-ground logistics and danger in delivering assistance, but also because Israel has heavily restricted aid from entering the enclave.

This is just the latest high-profile incident in which civilians and civilian institutions in Gaza have been killed in large numbers during the war in Gaza; ambulances, hospitals, schools, and other facilities run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) have all been attacked in Gaza over the four months of the war, further endangering Palestinian lives already at risk not just due to bombardment, but now also starvation and disease.

In the span of five months, this conflict has killed 30,000 Palestinians and injured tens of thousands more; as already-scarce resources dwindle, those numbers are likely to increase exponentially unless there is a sustained ceasefire.

How were so many people killed and wounded?

Hundreds of people in Gaza City awaited the arrival of the aid convoy — some lining up Wednesday to get the canned goods and flour from aid trucks in the besieged city. People throughout Gaza are in extreme need, but the north, where Gaza City sits, faces particularly serious and pressing shortages of the most basic goods; an aid convoy that arrived earlier this week was reportedly the first in a month.

What happened to the people waiting for aid is a matter of debate. In an emailed statement, the Israel Defense Forces acknowledged an incident in Gaza City, saying only that ”Gazan residents surrounded the trucks, and looted the supplies being delivered. During the incident, dozens of Gazans were injured as a result of pushing and trampling. The incident is under review.”

However, the IDF’s on-the-record statement contained no acknowledgment of the claim that Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd, nor of casualty reports. That contrasts with accounts from Gaza health authority officials and multiple eyewitnesses of Israeli troops firing into the crowd as people tried to get to the food on the trucks.

Around 100 people with gunshot wounds were treated at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City, the New York Times reported. The hospital also received the bodies of 12 people who had been shot and killed. More than 150 patients, many with shooting injuries, were being treated at al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza, as Dr. Mohammed Salha, the hospital’s acting director, told the Associated Press.

A later press conference by Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an IDF spokesperson, mentioned that the IDF fired warning shots but blamed casualties on people trampling each other as they tried to get access to food and supplies. He denied that there was an Israeli strike on the convoy of 38 trucks.

One Palestinian eyewitness, Kamel Abu Nahel, told the Associated Press that Israeli troops fired initial shots which scattered the crowd. After the shooting stopped and people returned, Abu Nahel said, troops opened fire again. He was shot in the leg and is being treated at Shifa hospital.

The information landscape in Gaza is extremely challenging. Foreign reporters have not been able to enter the area during the ongoing operations since October 7, and details of exactly what happened are still coming to light.

But what we do know is that Israel has repeatedly attacked, blocked, and destroyed humanitarian infrastructure and access throughout the war.

How desperate is the situation in northern Gaza?

Northern Gaza is where the IDF began its initial ground invasion in October; Israel targeted Gaza City as a Hamas stronghold. Though much of the population has been displaced to southern Gaza, there are still thousands of civilians in the area, and they have not had adequate aid distribution in around two months, Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, told Vox.

“The biggest obstacle has simply been that the Israeli government has, for the most part, denied aid groups access to that part of the territory,” he told Vox.

The UN organization that is usually in charge of distributing aid to Palestine, UNRWA, cannot operate in the area for safety reasons. And aid workers have said they’ve found trying to work with Israel to get aid into Gaza all but impossible.

After a UNRWA and World Food Program aid convoy “coordinated with the Israelis,” according to Konyndyk, it was fired upon by Israeli troops. “There’s no confidence amongst professional humanitarians that they can actually have safe access into the north and that they won’t be targeted.”

Israel has also accused UNRWA of being in league with Hamas, and that accusation led many countries, including the US, to pause financial contributions to the organization. Aid distribution is challenging and requires significant coordination; without that, it’s easy for a situation in which people are starving and under significant duress to spiral out of control and turn violent.

Such infrastructure once existed in Gaza — via UNRWA and with the cooperation of Hamas civilian police — but that has been devastated by Israeli assaults and, in the case of UNRWA, an effort to undermine the organization.

“The best way to get humanitarian aid into Gaza is to stop the fighting,” Brian Finucane, senior adviser in the US policy program at the International Crisis Group, told Vox in an interview. “Based on reports today, in recent weeks, the breakdown of any sort of order in Gaza is even complicating that further and that Israel itself is contributing [to] that in no small part, including by targeting the police inside Gaza.”

Hagari said during the press conference that a private contractor was coordinating the aid distribution, although he did not name the contractor. Vox reached out to the IDF and to Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) for more information but did not receive a response by press time.

As part of potential ceasefire negotiations, the US is pushing for increased humanitarian access in Gaza, but so far has not backed up that rhetoric with meaningful action like pausing the flow of weapons to Israel or proposing a ceasefire resolution in the UN Security Council. So despite the concerted efforts of diplomats and humanitarian workers, Finucane said, “They don’t have much to work with if the US bottom line is unconditional support for this catastrophic conflict.”