The Israeli army admitted to having fired into a crowd of Palestinians gathered around food aid trucks this Thursday, February 29. The shootings reportedly left between ten and a hundred dead.
The delivery of food aid has turned into a scene of chaos. The distribution of food in the north of the Gaza Strip was disrupted by shooting which left dozens, even a hundred dead according to testimonies, this Thursday, February 29. According to a doctor at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, interviewed by AFP, Israeli soldiers shot at “thousands of citizens” who were converging on trucks filled with humanitarian aid near a roundabout in the west of the city.
For its part, the Israeli army indicated that Gaza residents had “surrounded the trucks” and “looted” their cargo. She adds on Other Israeli sources told AFP that soldiers feeling “threatened” by the crowd movement had opened fire, but without their shots being responsible for the heavy toll announced.
“104 dead and 760 injured” according to Hamas
Only the Hamas Ministry of Health provided figures after the shootings during the distribution of food aid. He speaks of a “massacre” which left “104 dead and 760 injured”. The American news agency Associated Press also counts more than 100 dead, but the number of victims still remains uncertain. Several hospitals in Gaza reported having received more than a dozen bodies and dozens of injured people, like the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City, Hussam Abu Safieyah. “We do not know how many other victims were taken to other hospitals,” he told Reuters. The Red Crescent humanitarian organization in Palestine told Al-Jazeera that 25 of its employees were killed in Thursday’s attack.
The beginnings of a famine in Gaza?
The shooting observed this Thursday came after the announcement of a new report by the Hamas Ministry of Health, according to which “more than 30,000” people have been killed in Israeli military operations in Gaza since the start of the war. , which broke out on October 7. American intelligence draws up an assessment of “more than 25,000 Palestinian women and children” killed since the start of the conflict, as the head of the Pentagon announced this Thursday, February 29. A figure which therefore does not take into account male victims, including Hamas fighters.
This new drama in the war between Israel and Hamas reflects the situation of famine which threatens the Gaza Strip and against which the UN has been warning for several months. The United Nations estimates that 2.2 million Gazans, almost the entire population, are at risk of famine. The humanitarian aid delivered is not enough to compensate for the damage caused by the war. According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, some 2,300 aid trucks entered the Gaza Strip in February, an average of 82 trucks per day, half as many as those transported into the Gaza Strip. enclave in January. The same agency explains that before the war 500 humanitarian trucks entered daily from Gaza.