by Thousands of people came out and camped overnight along a coastal road in the cold Gaza night, huddled around small bonfires, waiting for supplies to arrive so they could feed their families.
What they found was hundreds dead and wounded, according to witnesses and a doctor who treated the wounded, when Israeli forces opened fire on desperate Palestinians who advanced when aid trucks finally arrived before dawn on Thursday.
“I saw things I never thought I would see,” said Mohammed Al-Sholi, who had camped overnight for a chance to get food for his family. “I saw people fall to the ground after being shot, and others simply grabbed the food they were carrying with them and continued running for their lives.”
Amid the chaos and bloodshed, some people were run over by aid trucks, he said.
On Friday, President Biden said the United States would begin airdropping aid to Gaza to help alleviate suffering there, as European leaders condemned Israel for the deaths of dozens of starving Palestinians who died while surrounding the aid convoy. .
Gaza health authorities have said Israeli troops killed more than 100 people and wounded 700 others in a “massacre” as the convoy moved along a dark road, a version of events that Israel disputed.
An Israeli military spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said Thursday that Israeli soldiers had been trying to secure the convoy and fired “when the mob moved in a way that endangered them.” But he said soldiers had not fired on people seeking help. The military has said most of the people died in a stampede and some were run over by trucks in Gaza City.
About 150 wounded and 12 of the dead were taken to Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, said Dr. Eid Sabbah, head of nursing there. He said about 95 percent of the injuries were from gunshots to the chest and abdomen.
The deaths sparked global outrage and intensified pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas that would allow more aid to reach Gaza.
French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné called for an independent investigation and said the violence around the convoy was the result of a humanitarian catastrophe that had left people “fighting for food.”
“What is happening is indefensible and unjustifiable,” Séjourné told France Inter radio on Friday. “Israel must be able to hear it and must stop.”
Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, called on the Israeli military to “fully explain” the killings and joined calls for a ceasefire.
“People in Gaza are closer to death than to life,” Baerbock said in a statement. “More humanitarian aid must arrive. Immediately”.
Biden said the United States would work with Jordan to airdrop aid to Gaza in the coming days.
“Innocent people were trapped in a terrible war, unable to feed their families, and you saw the response when they tried to get help,” Biden said at the White House, before meeting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy. “But we need to do more, and the United States will do more.”
Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that regardless of how people near the convoy died, it was clear they were trying to get food.
“That can’t happen,” he said. “Desperate civilians trying to feed their starving families should not be shot.”
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said Israel has an obligation to ensure significantly more humanitarian aid reaches civilians in Gaza.
“A sustained pause in the fighting is the only way to deliver vital aid on the scale needed and free the hostages cruelly held by Hamas,” he said in a statement.
Palestinians, particularly in the north, have been battling hunger and regularly converge on the relatively few aid trucks that have entered the territory. Aid groups and the United Nations have accused Israel of blocking aid to northern Gaza, which Israel has denied. Aid groups have also reported rampant looting of aid trucks in the area.
A small number of police officers from Hamas-led security forces have reported to work in Gaza City in recent weeks, but have largely failed to restore basic security, residents said. Last week, the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency, joined UNRWA, the United Nations agency serving Palestinians in Gaza, in stopping aid shipments to the north, citing lawlessness in area.
On Friday, the European Union said it planned to substantially increase funding for UNRWA this year and would give it 50 million euros, or about $54 million, next week.
The announcement was a lifeline for the agency, which has been fighting for its survival after some donor countries suspended its funding, citing Israeli accusations that a dozen of the agency’s 13,000 workers were involved in the Hamas-led attacks on the 7th. October.
Data shows that the number of aid trucks entering Gaza dropped significantly in February, even as humanitarian leaders warned of famine and said some people had resorted to eating bird seeds and leaves.
According to UNRWA, an average of 96 trucks per day entered Gaza as of February 27, a 30 percent drop from the January average and the lowest monthly average since before the ceasefire in late November. Before the war, around 500 aid trucks entered Gaza every day.
The decrease reflects, in part, Israel’s insistence on inspecting every truck at the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Israel, which has acted as the main entry gate since it reopened in December. Aid also reaches Gaza from Egypt through a crossing in the city of Rafah after Israeli officials inspected the shipment for weapons and other contraband.
Aid officials said that, while necessary, the inspection system had caused significant delays that resulted in less aid overall.
On Thursday, Israeli soldiers were providing security for the convoy entering Gaza City, with private vehicles distributing food from international donors, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, told Britain’s Channel 4.
Edited drone video footage released by the Israeli military, along with social media videos of the scene analyzed by The New York Times, do not fully explain the sequence of events. Videos show hundreds of people surrounding and boarding trucks and people crawling and ducking for cover.
Mr. Al-Sholi, a 34-year-old taxi driver, said he went to meet the convoy because he and his family, including three young children, had been surviving on little more than the spices, chopped wheat and wild vegetables they can find.
On Wednesday, he learned that people had received bags of flour from aid trucks and there were rumors that another convoy would arrive. So he went with friends to a roundabout to wait. He said he had never seen so many people gathered in one place.
“Just before the trucks arrived, a tank started advancing toward us (it was around 3:30 a.m.) and fired a few shots into the air,” Al-Sholi said in a telephone interview, referring to the Israeli tanks. “That tank fired at least one projectile. “It was dark and I ran towards a destroyed building and took shelter there.”
When the trucks arrived shortly after, “people ran towards them to get food and drink and anything else they could get,” said Mohammad Hamoudeh, a photographer in Gaza City. But when people reached the trucks, he said, “the tanks started shooting directly at the people.”
And he added: “I saw them shooting directly with a machine gun.”
Witnesses said Israeli tanks fired at people even as they began to flee. Israeli forces continued to regularly fire on Gazans from 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., when they first arrived, until around 7 a.m., witnesses said.
On Thursday, Admiral Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said troops “did not fire on those seeking help, despite the accusations.”
“We did not shoot at the humanitarian convoy, neither from the air nor from the ground,” he said. “We secured it so it could reach northern Gaza.”
Hamoudeh said that despite the panic at the scene, many still ran to get supplies. “People were terrified, but not everyone,” he said. “There were those who risked dying just to get food. “They just want to live.”
The report was contributed by Victoria Kim, bengali shashank, Abu Bakr Bashir, Nader Ibrahim, Julian E. Barnes, Lauren Leatherby, Gaya Gupta, Monika Pronczuk, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Adam Sella.
