More than 100 Palestinians were killed in Gaza City on Thursday when Israeli forces opened fire on people trying to get food from humanitarian aid trucks, but accounts of the attack remained divided.
Gaza hospital officials initially reported Israeli attacks on crowds at the Nabsi roundabout in the west of the city. Witnesses later said Israeli troops opened fire as people hauled flour and canned goods from trucks.
Israeli officials acknowledged that troops opened fire, saying they did so because they believed people rushing toward the rescue truck “posed a threat.”
The military initially said “dozens of people were killed and injured as trucks pushed, trampled and crushed them”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office gave a similar explanation, saying many of the dead were crushed to death after “rescue trucks were swamped by people trying to rob them.”
Gaza’s Hamas health ministry said Thursday’s events kicked off nearly five months of war between Israel and Hamas militants in which the death toll now exceeds 30,000. The war began on October 7 with Hamas’s shocking attacks on Israel, killing 1,200 people.
U.S. President Joe Biden said in Washington on Thursday that a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza was unlikely to be achieved before Monday, a timeline he predicted earlier this week.
Asked by reporters if he expected that to happen, Biden said there was “eternal hope” and that he had been discussing a ceasefire with regional leaders, but added that “probably not by Monday.”
The Israel Defense Forces reported ground operations in northern Gaza on Thursday and airstrikes in the Khan Younis area in the southern part of the territory.
In Geneva, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said all parties in Israel’s war with Hamas had committed war crimes.
“The time is now – long overdue for peace, investigation and accountability,” Türk told the UN Human Rights Council.
Turk also warned of Israeli plans to launch an offensive in the Rafah area of southern Gaza, home to an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians, many of whom have fled to seek safety in other areas.
Turk said an attack on Rafah “will take the nightmare suffered by the people of Gaza to a new, dystopian dimension.”
Israeli officials said they would evacuate civilians from Rafah, but they did not provide any details on where the Palestinians might go. Egypt, which borders Rafah, has said it will not open its borders. Since the outbreak of the October war, much of Gaza has been leveled in a massive Israeli counteroffensive.
Aid workers trying to distribute or receive humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip face life-threatening challenges, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York that the dangers posed by the conflict have prompted the U.N. to repeatedly call for a humanitarian ceasefire.
“Yes, there are trucks entering Gaza from Israel. As we have described many times, the situation in Gaza makes it almost impossible to carry out our humanitarian work,” Dujarric said.
“A violent conflict is taking place. Law and order has broken down. There is insufficient coordination in terms of security and deconfliction with Israel. We have listed all the challenges. This does not prevent us from working.”
Information for this report was obtained in part from The Associated Press, AFP and Reuters.
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