At least 27 Palestinians were killed and dozens injured on Tuesday after Israeli troops opened fire near an aid centre in Rafah, health officials said – the third consecutive day of bloodshed during humanitarian operations inside Gaza.
Israel’s military said its forces had opened fire on a group viewed as a threat for leaving a designated access route, and denied targeting civilians.
Volker Turk, head of the United Nations human rights office in Geneva, said the impediment of access to food relief for civilians might constitute a war crime and described attacks on people trying to access food aid as “unconscionable”. He called for an prompt and impartial investigation into the killings.
Israeli warplanes as well as forces on the ground targeted crowds near the distribution centre run by the US-based and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the Palestinian Authority’s Wafa news agency reported.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said its field hospital in Rafah had received 184 casualties, adding that 19 of those were dead upon arrival, and eight died of their wounds shortly after. Video showed injured people, including at least one woman, being rushed to a medical centre on carts drawn by donkeys.
The shootings all occurred at the Flag Roundabout, around a kilometre from the GHF site in Rafah. The GHF said civilians were hit “after moving beyond the designated safe corridor and into a closed military zone,” in an area that was “well beyond our secure distribution site.”
The entire area is an Israeli military zone where journalists have no access outside of army-approved embeds.
The individuals were moving towards forces in a way that “posed a threat to [the soldiers]”, the military said, adding that the incident occurred some distance away from the aid distribution site in a “closed military zone”.
The deaths came hours after Israel said three of its soldiers had been killed in fighting in northern Gaza, as its forces pushed ahead with a months-long offensive against Hamas militants that has laid much of the enclave to waste.
The GHF’s aid plan has been criticised by both the UN and established aid charities, which say it does not follow humanitarian principles. In particular they have questioned GHF’s biometric scanning policies, which Israel says are designed to prevent Hamas from profiting from aid, and say the foundation is unable to meet the mounting needs of the territory’s roughly 2 million people.
The private group said it distributed 21 truckloads of food early on Tuesday and that the aid operation was “conducted safely and without incident within the site”.
The GHF’s distribution of aid, which began last week, has been marred by chaos, and multiple witnesses have reported incidents of Israeli troops firing on crowds near the delivery sites.
On Sunday, Palestinian and international officials reported that at least 31 people were killed and dozens more injured. Israel’s military dismissed those reports as “fabrications” by Hamas.
On Monday, three more Palestinians were reportedly killed by Israeli fire.
