Representative image | (Photo:AP/PTI)
Gaza’s Health Ministry and witnesses said Israeli forces opened fire Thursday as a crowd of Palestinians gathered for humanitarian aid in Gaza City, killing at least 20 and wounding dozens.
The Israeli military said it is investigating the reports. The Associated Press could not independently confirm the details of what happened.
Witnesses and health officials said the shooting took place at a roundabout on the southern edge of Gaza City, where a large crowd had gathered for food distribution. Footage posted online, confirmed to have been taken on the main road near the roundabout, shows hundreds of people fleeing, some carrying boxes of aid, as fire sounds in the background. Men loaded wounded Palestinians onto horse and donkey carts that rushed down the avenue.
At Shifa Hospital, where the victims were being treated, Mohammad al-Reafi lay on the ground, his bloodied leg bandaged, as medics worked around them on other wounded people. He said Israeli forces fired into the crowd.
We went to get flour… young people were tortured and other young people were injured,” he said. Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said 20 people were killed and 150 others injured in the shooting.
A number of aid organizations distribute food and other supplies in Gaza. It was not immediately known who was active in the area at the time of the incident. The U.N. refugee agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, and the U.N. World Food Program both said they were not involved.
Israeli troops and tanks entered Gaza City shortly after the ground invasion began in October and have been fighting Palestinian militants there for almost two months. The army says it has largely dismantled Hamas in northern Gaza, but continues to face pockets of resistance, and large parts of Gaza City and surrounding areas have been reduced to rubble by Israeli bombardments.
The UN has said it is struggling to deliver aid to the north amid Israeli restrictions and ongoing fighting. It is believed that several hundred thousand people remain in the north after most of the population fled south. UN officials say a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are facing famine.
Israel launched its offensive in Gaza, vowing to destroy Hamas after the October 7 cross-border attack in which the militants killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped about 250 others. More than 25,900 Palestinians have been killed in one of the largest air and ground campaigns in recent history, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
The count does not distinguish between civilians and fighters, but the ministry says most of the dead are women and minors. It said the actual toll is higher because many victims are buried under rubble or in areas where medics cannot reach them.
Israel blames Hamas for the high civilian toll as the militant group positions fighters, rocket launchers and tunnels in densely populated residential areas. The army says it has killed thousands of militants, without giving a basis for the count, and that 219 of its soldiers have been killed in the Gaza offensive.
Fierce fighting has raged for weeks as Israeli forces push into the southern town of Khan Younis and into a cluster of built-up refugee camps in central Gaza dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s founding.
The death toll from an attack on a crowded U.N. shelter in Khan Younis on Wednesday rose to 12, with more than 75 injured, according to Thomas White, a senior official at the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. He said 15 of the injured were in critical condition.
UNRWA says two tank shells hit a building at a carpenter training center housing thousands of displaced Palestinians on Wednesday, causing the building to catch fire. It did not directly blame Israel, the only side in the conflict with tanks.
The Israeli military said it had currently ruled out that the attack was carried out by its aircraft or artillery, but was still investigating. It says the building may have been hit by a Hamas rocket.
Fighting has closed the two main hospitals, Nasser and Al Amal, trapping hundreds of patients and thousands of displaced people. White said another hospital, Al-Khair, was evacuated overnight and among the patients who left were women who had just undergone caesarean sections.
Israeli forces earlier this week seized Al-Khair Hospital, located in a coastal area near Khan Younis that the army had previously said was a safe zone for Palestinians.
Thousands of Palestinians fled Khan Younis to the Mediterranean coast on Thursday to escape the fighting. Two women who spoke to the Associated Press said they were among a number of people forced to evacuate by Israeli forces from a school where they had been sheltering.
Suddenly, they started shouting over the microphones to evacuate the site within half an hour, said one of the women, Amal, who said she had given birth three days earlier and fled the school with her newborn baby. “Now we’re here and we don’t know where to go,” she said. The troops detained young men at the school for questioning, she said.
The Israeli army said its forces engaged in close urban fighting with Hamas fighters in the neighborhoods of Khan Younis, using airstrikes and attack helicopters to hit militants spotted with RPGs and weapons.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to continue the offensive until complete victory over Hamas and return all hostages. The United States, Israel’s main ally, has provided crucial military support and shielded the country from international calls for a ceasefire. and urged the country to scale back operations and facilitate the delivery of more humanitarian aid.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
First print: January 26, 2024 | 7:18 am IST