Gaza (Quds News Network)- On Tuesday, thousands of starving Palestinians made their way to an aid distribution point run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a controversial US-Israeli organization assigned to deliver aid to Gaza after more than 80 days of a total Israeli blockade.
With the Israeli helicopters and drones hovering above and gunfire echoing nearby, families, including women and children, faced great difficulty reaching the food distribution site in southern Gaza’s Rafah, as the GHF began its operations.
Desperate civilians scrambled over barriers and squeezed through dense crowds to access the vital supplies.
What Happened?
“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 on Tuesday.
It added that the incident “provides undeniable evidence of the Israeli occupation’s total failure in managing the humanitarian catastrophe it has deliberately created”.
In a statement earlier, the Israeli military claimed its forces did not direct gunfire towards the Palestinians but rather fired warning shots in an outside area.
Three people were killed and 46 injured in the attack. Seven others reported missing, according to the Media Office.
The GHF denied the deadly massacre. “At one moment in the late afternoon, the volume of people at the [distribution site] was such that the GHF team fell back to allow a small number of Gazans to take aid safely and dissipate,” the group said in a statement.
Operations have now returned to normal, the group claimed, adding that it has distributed approximately 8,000 food boxes, which it says will feed 5.5 people for 3.5 days, and adds up to about 462,000 meals.
“Full-Fledged War Crime”
The incident has prompted criticism from the United Nations and aid groups.
“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,” the Gaza Media Office said.
Ahmed Bayram, spokesperson for the NRC, called on Israel and the US to cancel their initiative and let humanitarian organisations do their job.
“What we’re seeing is indeed a summary of the tragedy that the people of Gaza are living,” he said.
“This is not how aid is done; this is not how aid should be distributed, not least obviously an occupier doing that – a country that has destroyed and flattened Rafah, asking people to come back to Rafah, that has displaced people out of Rafah, and now tells them to come back and receive whatever they can get hold of.”
A spokesman for the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, said the images and videos from the aid points set up by GHF were “heartbreaking, to say the least”.
“We and our partners have a detailed, principled, operationally sound plan supported by member states to get aid to a desperate population,” Stephane Dujarric told reporters.
“Humanitarian aid needs to be distributed in a way that is safe under principles of independence [and] impartiality – in the way we’ve always done it… We saw the plan that they’ve [Gaza Humanitarian Foundation] published and that they presented to us, and it is not done with the parameters that we feel match our principles, which we apply across the board, from Gaza to Sudan to Myanmar, to anywhere you want to talk about.”
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