CAIRO/JERUSALEM – At least 20 Palestinians were killed on Wednesday at an aid distribution site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in what the US-backed group said was a crowd surge instigated by armed agitators.
The GHF, which is supported by Israel, said 19 people were trampled and one fatally stabbed during the crush at one of its centres in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
“We have credible reason to believe that elements within the crowd – armed and affiliated with Hamas – deliberately fomented the unrest,” GHF said in a statement.
Hamas rejected the GHF allegation as “false and misleading”, saying GHF guards and Israeli soldiers sprayed people with pepper gas and opened fire.
GHF said Hamas’ account was “blatantly false”.
“At no point was tear gas deployed, nor were shots fired into the crowd. Limited use of pepper spray was deployed, only to safeguard additional loss of life,” GHF said in a written response to Reuters via e-mail.
“Today’s incident is part of a larger pattern of Hamas trying to undermine and ultimately end GHF. It is no coincidence that this incident occurred during ceasefire negotiations, where Hamas continues to demand that GHF cease operations.”
Witnesses told Reuters that guards at the site sprayed pepper gas at them after they had locked the gates to the centre, trapping them between the gates and the outer wire-fence.
“People kept gathering and pressuring each other; when people pushed each other…those who couldn’t stand fell under the people and were crushed,” said eyewitness Mahmoud Fojo, 21, who was hurt in the stampede.
“Some people started jumping over the netted fence and got wounded. We were injured, and God saved us. We were under the people and we said the Shahada (death prayers). We thought we were dying, finished,” he added.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli army on Hamas and eyewitness accounts.
Palestinian health officials told Reuters that 21 people had died of suffocation at the site. One medic said lots of people had been crammed into a small space and had been crushed.
On Tuesday, the UN rights office in Geneva said it had recorded at least 875 killings, within the past six weeks in the vicinity of aid sites and food convoys in Gaza – the majority of them close to GHF distribution points.
Most of those deaths were caused by gunfire that locals have blamed on the Israeli military. The military has acknowledged that Palestinian civilians were harmed near aid distribution centres, saying that Israeli forces had been issued new instructions with “lessons learned”.
The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to get supplies into Gaza, largely bypassing a UN-led system that Israel alleges has let Hamas-led militants loot aid shipments intended for civilians. Hamas denies the accusation.
The UN has called the GHF’s model unsafe and a breach of humanitarian impartiality standards – an allegation GHF has denied.
Amjad Al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, accused the GHF on Wednesday of gross mismanagement.
“People who flock in their thousands (to GHF sites) are hungry and exhausted, and they get squeezed into narrow places, amid shortages of aid and the absence of organization and discipline by the GHF,” he told Reuters.
The war in Gaza, triggered in October 2023 by a deadly Hamas attack on Israel, has displaced almost all of the territory’s population and led to widespread hunger and privation. (Reuters)
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