
Crush at Gaza aid site kills at least 20 Palestinians as Israeli strikes kill 41 more
Witnesses said GHF guards threw stun grenades and used pepper spray on people pressing to get into the site before it opened, causing a panic in the narrow, fenced-in entrance.
The GHF, which is supported by Israel, said 19 people were trampled and one fatally stabbed during the crush at one of its centres between Khan Younis and Rafah 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", blaming the incident on the GHF and Israel's military.
Witnesses told Reuters that guards at the site targeted them with pepper spray 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 (Editor's note: the Muslim testimony of faith, often recited by dying believers). We thought we were dying, finished," he added.
There has been no immediate comment by the GHF or Israeli army on 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.
The deaths came as Israeli strikes killed 41 others, including 11 children, in Gaza City and Khan Younis, according to hospital officials. The Israeli military said it has struck more than 120 targets in the past 24 hours across the Gaza Strip, including Hamas military infrastructure of tunnels and weapons storage facilities.
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".
06:36
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, and the UN has rejected claims that significant amounts of aid has been diverted by the militant group.
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.
Israeli army road
Earlier on Wednesday, the Israeli military said it had finished paving a new road in southern Gaza separating several towns east of Khan Younis from the rest of the territory in an effort to disrupt Hamas operations.
Palestinians see the road, which extends Israeli control, as a way to put pressure on Hamas in ongoing ceasefire talks, which started on July 6 and are being brokered by Arab mediators Egypt and Qatar with the backing of the United States.
Palestinian sources close to the negotiations said a breakthrough had not yet been reached on any of the main issues.
Hamas said it rejected an Israeli demand to keep at least 40 percent of Gaza under its control as part of any deal. Hamas also demanded the dismantlement of the GHF and the reinstatement of a UN-led aid delivery mechanism.
Senior Hamas official Basem Naim said in a post on his Facebook page that the road showed Israel was not serious about reaching a ceasefire deal and confirms "the occupation's long-term intentions and plans to remain inside the Strip".
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the war will end once Hamas is disarmed and removed from Gaza.
Gaza local health authorities said Israeli military strikes have killed at least 87 people across the enclave in the past 24 hours.
Israel's campaign in Gaza has killed more than 58,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities.
Almost 1,650 Israelis and foreign nationals have been killed as a result of the conflict, including 1,200 killed in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack, by Israeli tallies.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

LeMonde
7 hours ago
- LeMonde
'The best show in town': From a hilltop in Israel, observers have a sinister view of Gaza bombings
Between two bombardments, Liram, Afik, and Emmanuel passed around a joint. On Thursday, July 17, at 6:30 pm, as on most evenings, the three friends, 27-year-old Israelis who preferred not to share their last names, met at the top of Kobi Hill, the highest point overlooking the city of Sderot on the edge of the Gaza Strip, to talk about work, travel, and "stock market investments," they listed. Right across from them, about one kilometer away, past the highway, a few fields, and a separation barrier, lay Beit Hanoun and the north of the Gaza Strip, which has been bombarded without pause for nearly two years. "When I see and hear a missile fall on Gaza, I am happy," Afik said, grinning in his shorts and brightly colored T-shirt, his pack of cigarettes and phone in front of him. On his device screen, the watch shop manager showed a photo of Avi Megira, his uncle, killed on his motorcycle in the streets of Sderot by a Hamas member during the massacres of October 7. Facing his two friends, a trader and an employee at the large printing plant in Kibbutz Be'eri, adjacent to the Gaza Strip, the young man, "frightened" by the proximity of the border with the Palestinian enclave, said he believed that freeing the last 50 Israeli hostages, of whom only about 20 are thought to be alive, could only happen through a violent military operation. Even if "millions" of Palestinians must die, he added. According to the latest figures shared by NGOs and international organizations on the ground, more than 58,000 people, the majority of them civilians, have already been killed by the Israeli army since October 7.

LeMonde
3 days ago
- LeMonde
93 Palestinians killed by Israeli army in Gaza while trying to collect aid, civil defense says
Gaza's civil defense agency said Israeli forces opened fire on crowds of Palestinians trying to collect humanitarian aid in the war-torn Palestinian territory on Sunday, July 20, killing 93 people and wounding dozens more. Eighty were killed as truckloads of aid arrived in the north, while nine others were reported shot near an aid point close to Rafah in the south, where dozens of people lost their lives just 24 hours earlier. Four were killed near another aid site in Khan Yunis, also in the south, agency spokesman Mahmud Basal told AFP. The UN World Food Programme said its 25-truck convoy carrying food aid "encountered massive crowds of hungry civilians which came under gunfire" near Gaza City, soon after it crossed from Israel and cleared checkpoints. Israel's military disputed the death toll and said soldiers had fired warning shots "to remove an immediate threat posed to them" as thousands gathered near Gaza City. Deaths of civilians seeking aid have become a regular occurrence in Gaza, with the authorities blaming Israeli fire as crowds facing chronic shortages of food and other essentials flock in huge numbers to aid centers. The UN said earlier this month that nearly 800 aid-seekers had been killed since late May, including on the routes of aid convoys. 'Sniper' fire In Gaza City, Qasem Abu Khater, 36, told AFP he had rushed to try to get a bag of flour but instead found a desperate crowd of thousands and "deadly overcrowding and pushing." "The tanks were firing shells randomly at us and Israeli sniper soldiers were shooting as if they were hunting animals in a forest," he added. "Dozens of people were martyred right before my eyes and no one could save anyone." The WFP condemned violence against civilians seeking aid as "completely unacceptable." Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify tolls and details provided by the agency and other parties. The army says it works to avoid harm to civilians, and that this month it issued new instructions to its troops on the ground "following lessons learned" from a spate of similar incidents. Israel on Sunday withdrew the residency permit of head of the OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) office in Israel, Jonathan Whittall, who has repeatedly condemned the humanitarian conditions in Gaza. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, in a post to X, accused him of spreading lies about the war in Gaza. The war was sparked by Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, leading to the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed 58,895 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.


Euronews
4 days ago
- Euronews
Israeli troops open fire on Palestinians headed to GHF hub, killing 32
Israeli troops opened fire on Saturday towards crowds of Palestinians seeking food at a distribution point run by an Israeli-backed US company in southern Gaza, killing at least 32 Palestinians, according to witnesses and local health officials. In a separate incident, at least 18 more Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strikes on Gaza City in the north of the enclave. The attacks occurred near hubs operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF). The Israeli military did not immediately react to reports of the two incidents. The GHF launched operations in late May with backing from the US and Israel. The two governments launched the initiative in a bid to replace the traditional UN-led aid distribution system in Gaza, after repeated accusations of Hamas militants stealing supplies. The Delaware-based GHF says it has distributed millions of meals to hungry Palestinians in its just over two months of operations. Local health officials and witnesses say hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops as they attempted to reach the distribution points. The Israeli army, as per an agreement with Washington, is not permitted physical presence at the GHF sites, but does work to secure the facilities from a distance. Israel says it only fires 'warning shots' if Palestinians get too close to their forces. The GHF, which employs private armed guards to secure its sites, says there have been no deadly shootings on their campuses. Earlier this week, 20 Palestinians were killed at a GHF site near Khan Younis, most of them in a stampede, in what was the first public recognition of fatalities at the US-led operation. Witnesses say the stampede occurred after a security forces deployed tear gas and stun grenades on the crowds of people lined up, inciting panic. Most of Saturday's deaths occurred as Palestinians massed in the Teina area, around three kilometres from the GHF aid site east of the city of Khan Younis. Mahmoud Mokeimar, an eyewitness, said he was walking with masses of people — mostly young men — towards the food hub. Troops fired warning shots as the crowds advanced, before opening fire toward the marching people, he said. 'It was a massacre, the occupation opened fire at us indiscriminately.' Mokeimar noted that he managed to flee but saw at least three motionless bodies lying on the ground, and many others fleeing who've been wounded. Akram Aker, another witness, said troops fired machine guns mounted on tanks and drones. He said the shooting happened between 5 and 6 am local time. 'They encircled us and started firing directly at us,' he said. Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry says the bodies of the 32 victims were transferred to the Nasser hospital. 70 others who has sustained injuries of various degrees were also admitted at the hospital. The latest attacks come as Palestinian students are scheduled to sit exams for the first time since Israel launched its offensive on the enclave more than 21 months ago. Some 1,500 students are set to complete their examinations on Saturday, in hopes of entering university. The death toll in Gaza has now surpassed 58,500 according to the health ministry. It's figures do not distinguish between civilian and combatant casualties, though deaths verified by the UN indicated that two-thirds of those killed were women and children. Israel's war on Gaza has began over 21 months ago, after Hamas fighters staged an attack on southern Israel, killing 1,200 people on 7 October, 2023. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he's not prepared to end the war until all of Israel's objectives are realised; the destruction, dissolution, disarmament and exile of Hamas.