After a trickle of just 38 food trucks, loaded by private contractors and escorted by Zionist Forces, arrived near Gaza City yesterday at about 4:30 AM, a crowd of Palestinian civilians which was estimated in the thousands ran in to secure food and water.
Those closest to where the trucks entered were said to have been waiting for most of the previous day. Tensions were high in the heat and dust.
Many of those were starving and knew the trucks were their only hope of survival, after months of being denied regular access to food, water, medicine, and medical care by the Israeli occupation forces. They also were aware the number of trucks would be minimal, in the few dozens at most, just a fraction of the many hundreds of those needed to meet the food needs of the roughly 300,000 Palestinians still huddled in and around Gaza City.
So, when the trucks arrived, the Palestinians raced forward to secure what they could for themselves and their families, to be as close to first in line as possible. These were no organized lines of people patiently waiting, since they had driven to this point by Israel in the months in which the insane war criminal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the order to halt deliveries of food, pour concrete into water distribution routes, and inflict mass slaughter and terror mostly from aerial assaults from above. This was also not about a last stand to fight off the Israeli military since there was no hope for that now. It was all about survival, along with the breakdown of societal norms which comes with that.
When the people who came to the trucks moved in, so too did Israeli killers and just started shooting people at random. There were at least some shells dropped from above on those gathered. At least one drone was said to have flown and exploded among those waiting for the supplies.
One of the Palestinians who reporters spoke with after the attacks said that he and two relatives of his had come to the line up in anticipation of the latest group of aid trucks several hours before they pulled in. They were there to see if they could get food for an extended family of over 60 who they said were suffering from “extreme” hunger.
Moments after the trucks arrived and Palestinians pushed in around them, this individual explained, it was not just gunfire the Israelis turned on them. Israeli tanks began firing as well.
When the smoke cleared after these trucks entered, on the ground reports from the Gaza Ministry of Health said the IDF had murdered at least 112 people and badly injured over 750 more in this assault.
Reports said that soon after the massacre armored vehicles had driven in quickly onto the scene, some of which ran over the dead and wounded lying in the streets.
As many of those killed or injured were rushed to what was left of four hospitals there. Those were al-Shifa, Ahli, and Kamal Adwan, all of which had been badly damaged by Israeli bombing attacks and chemical fire drops in the earliest stages of this phase of Israel’s war against the Palestinians. There were also some Jordanian hospitals which were used as gathering points. Each of these were hard to reach since the roads in this region had long since been shredded by shells from above and heavy military vehicles from below. The few ambulances available could not travel along the route at all, so trucks, cars, and other vehicles were used to bring in the wounded and dead.
Israel of course denied any wrongdoing in the attacks on the waiting Palestinians, despite the insanity of claiming such a thing in the face of extensive video and still photographic coverage of what happened.
The head of the Zionist disinformation group, Nir Dinar, insisted in his message that there was “no IDF involvement” in what he carefully labeled a “mass casualty.” Pressed on details, he did agree that Israeli forces had fired on some of the Palestinians who came close to soldiers while scrambling to get something to eat. Yet despite that, he still insisted those who died lost their lives as people pushed too close together to one another.
Observers on the ground and reports from the hospitals which received the dead and injured countered the Israeli lies. The people who were brought in for treatment had clearly been shot.
Daniel Hagari, the IDF’s main military spokesperson, insisted once he had a chance to hold a news conference on what happened that, “There was no IDF strike on this aid.”
“We have been conducting a humanitarian operation of this kind for the last four nights without any problem,” he continued. “This was the first night that we had this kind of event.”
Hagari’s depiction was countered by multiple reputable ground reports which spoke to the truth of Zionist killers doing the killing yesterday. Reporters also noted Zionist forces had also shot at Palestinians lining over the last several days while waiting for food on Salah al-Din Street, a place just outside Gaza City where aid trucks had queued with food supplies earlier this week.
There were also video records of what had happened which directly contradict the lies that Israel’s Hagar and Dinar were telling reporters, and which instead strongly supported what the many eyewitnesses and information from the hospitals showed.
The catastrophic and deliberate slaughter of the people waiting for aid yesterday happened just two days after Carl Skou, the Deputy Executive Director of the World Food Programme, gave a briefing to the United Nations at a High-Level Open Debate on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict on February 27. There he spoke to the group about the growing desperate situation for the Palestinians just from lack of food alone, something which certainly played into their panic as the very food trucks arrived came in yesterday morning.
“As you have already heard, the Famine Review Committee has warned of a real prospect of famine by May, with over 500,000 people at risk if the threat is allowed to materialize,” he said to the group. “Even before October, two-thirds of the people in Gaza were supported with food assistance. Today, food aid is required by almost the entire population of 2.2 million people. Gaza is seeing the worst level of child malnutrition anywhere in the world. One child in every six under the age of two is acutely malnourished.”
Skou spoke of having been “forced to pause deliveries of food to the north until conditions are in place that allow for safe distributions”, a decision he said the WFP has not taken lightly,” as we know it means conditions will worsen, and more people will be at risk of dying from hunger-related causes.”
It was unavoidable, he explained, because of “the breakdown in civil order, driven by sheer desperation, [which] is preventing the safe distribution of aid.”
That civil order has grown worse of late, as Israel began deliberately attacking unarmed quasi-police officials in Gaza which Hamas had set up to protect the aid trucks as they entered. Without those present, the aid trucks were regularly ransacked and looted by a growing array of gangs which have begun operating on the streets in Gaza or rushed just as in the present case by civilians.
In response to the mass deaths, Hamas officials said late yesterday that Israeli’s mass murder and brutality surrounding this aid truck delivery could be enough to cause them to withdraw from any further negotiations over a prisoner exchange and possible ceasefire along the Gaza Strip.
“Negotiations conducted by the movement’s leadership are not an open process at the expense of our people’s blood,” Hamas said in a statement released after what happened.
Qatar, one of the nations which is working to coordinate a new possible ceasefire in direct talks including Israel, Egypt, and the United States, and indirectly with Hamas, came out harshly against Israel’s massacre of 112 and injuring of over 750 yesterday while waiting for food and more.
“Qatar condemns in the strongest terms the heinous massacre committed by the Israeli occupation, against defenseless civilians who were waiting for humanitarian aid to arrive in Gaza, resulting in the death and injury of dozens of people,” its Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a formal statement. “The Ministry… stresses that the continuation of the occupation’s brutal crimes, as part of its brutal war on the Gaza Strip, proves day after day the pressing need for urgent international action to immediately end this unprecedented aggression in recent history.”
Qatar was just one of many nations which registered disgust and disbelief over the vicious attack by fascist Israel against the Palestinians waiting at the food distribution site yesterday. Turkey called what Israel did "another crime against humanity." The French government said “the fire by Israeli soldiers against civilians trying to access food is unjustifiable." China said it was "shocked" over what Israel had done. Colombia denounced this as further evidence of the "genocide" being carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza and suspended some existing trade with Israel. Italy decried the "tragic deaths" of the Palestinians early morning yesterday and called for an "immediate ceasefire" as the only reasonable course of action for all.
The useless UN Security Council held an emergency session late Thursday to discuss what happened and take some actions to address it, but anything it decides would likely be vetoed by Israel's proxy, the United States.