It was dark when about 30 food trucks reached an Israeli checkpoint on Al Rashid Street in Gaza City, a stretch of Mediterranean road dotted just four months ago with hotels, wedding halls and ice cream stands.
But around 4 a.m. on February 29, as videos shared by Palestinians show, it was a dystopian landscape: hungry men climbing onto buildings destroyed by the Israeli army, lighting fires to keep warm and looking for food to take home at their families.
News had spread that a convoy was expected and Amein Abou al-Hassan, 40, had walked two hours to try to feed his wife and three children: a bag of flour on the black market now cost $500.
For weeks, around 300,000 people in northern Gaza faced starvation to the point of famine, the UN had warned. According to United Nations officials who carried out a rare reconnaissance mission in the north, which has been completely devastated by the Israeli military campaign, mothers used donkey feed to make bread and children plucked leaves from trees to chew.
Civil order had all but collapsed: the Palestinian police had disappeared after their colleagues were killed in Israeli airstrikes, and now gangs of youths roamed the streets, swooping down on the smallest food convoys – some desperately hungry, others looting food to resell. the black market.
On Thursday morning, as trucks passed the Israeli checkpoint, a chaotic crowd began taking food. In the sky, an Israeli drone watched; in edited footage released by the IDF, hundreds of men surrounded the trucks.
Then the sound of automatic weapons fire was heard. In a video shot by an Al Jazeera journalist, tracer bullets lit up the night sky and dozens of gunshots were heard. The drone captured the men ducking and running. One frame showed at least 10 bodies lying prone just meters from an Israeli tank.
Al-Hassan told the Financial Times that he ran away when the shooting began, confused by what had triggered it. He recalled “horrible scenes”.
By the time the sun rose, dozens of people were dead. Gaza health officials said Friday the total was at least 112. The dead and wounded were taken – many on donkey carts to carry food – to barely functioning hospitals. Many had gunshot wounds, according to doctors.
The Israeli military later acknowledged that forces ensuring the security of the humanitarian convoy had fired “warning shots” at an arriving crowd of thousands, but denied being responsible for the deaths.
“Some [in the crowd] they began to violently push and even trample other Gazans to death, plundering humanitarian supplies,” Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said Thursday evening.
Palestinian officials and eyewitnesses described it as a massacre of starving people, blaming the killings on Israeli troops firing into the crowd.
What happened that chaotic morning has now become a major international incident, with France and Germany calling for an investigation.
US President Joe Biden and Hamas – the militant group with which Israel is at war – have both warned that the fallout from the deaths could jeopardize delicate negotiations aimed at securing the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners in a cease-fire. Ramadan fire.
In several interviews with the FT, Western officials tasked with increasing supplies of food and medicine to Gaza said the crowds’ desperation had been building for weeks, if not months.
Since Israel and Hamas went to war on October 7, so little food and medicine has entered the Gaza Strip that the United Nations has warned that many of its 2.3 million people now face severe food insecurity . The charity Save The Children said this week that Gaza is “witnessing a mass killing of children in slow motion because there is no more food”.
This humanitarian crisis has been exacerbated by factors directly under the control of the Israeli military, said Jamie McGoldrick, the UN humanitarian coordinator for the Middle East, appointed late last year by the Security Council to help alleviate suffering in Gaza .
The most pressing problem, he said, is coordinating the distribution of aid within the enclave with Israeli forces.
“We need to talk to the heart of the IDF and find out if we can have a dialogue with them about how to work together,” he said. “What we need to do is talk to the people who shoot: a little discipline with them, and a little discipline with us, can help solve some of these problems.”
The more immediate issue, said two Western officials who recently spent time in Gaza, is Israel’s refusal to let the Palestinian police – which is nominally distinct from the Hamas militant group – return to work and provide some degree of security for aid shipments.
On February 6, an Israeli warplane attacked a police car escorting a shipment of food. An Israeli leaflet dropped after the airstrike depicted the destroyed police car alongside the words: “Our message is clear; The Israeli security services will not allow the Hamas security apparatus to continue to function.”
A nascent deal, brokered by Egypt, in which Israel would allow police to return to work without uniforms or sidearms has yet to be implemented. Without this agreement and with so little food entering the Strip, the absence of any civil order has turned desperation into lawlessness, both officials said.
“There is so much desperation. . . for people who can’t get food regularly,” McGoldrick said. “If they see normal trucks [arriving]they’re not as desperate – and it’s worse in the north, where that desperation really comes to the fore.”
The Israeli military said Thursday’s pre-dawn shipment into northern Gaza was the fourth such private convoy allowed by Israel this week. United Nations officials have said their humanitarian convoys have been refused entry for several weeks and that in at least three cases in recent months Israeli troops have fired on humanitarian shipments across Gaza.
Israel has so far also refused to open additional border crossings for aid entry, beyond the two currently open at the southern end of the enclave: Kerem Shalom on the Israeli side and Rafah on the Egyptian side. It also imposes lengthy inspections on each shipment.
The IDF has also limited the roads that convoys can use within Gaza. According to United Nations officials, the only way to transport aid north is along Al Rashid Street, where trucks were being looted even before Thursday’s killings. As trucks sit at an Israeli checkpoint near the Wadi Gaza stream, word spreads that food is becoming available, attracting crowds of young people.
This has left the most vulnerable even hungrier, especially the elderly, the injured and families without men capable of carrying the 50-pound bags back to their families, McGoldrick said.
The Israeli military body responsible for civil affairs in Gaza, called Cogat, has been saying for months that the United Nations and other humanitarian agencies must increase their logistical capabilities to meet the wartime challenge.
“Israel places no limits [on] the amount of aid that can get to Gaza,” Hagari said Thursday, but admitted that the delivery of such aid “is a problem.”
Many people familiar with humanitarian efforts in Gaza believe this to be false, as Israel must provide “better deconfliction” [for the aid convoys], better security. . . and to show more flexibility in general,” one person said.
According to Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA – the main relief agency for Palestinians – aid was simply not reaching those in need.
“If you look at the average number of trucks coming in, it’s clear that they halved in February,” he said. “And the more you decrease the supply to Gaza, the more you will fuel anguish, desperation and chaos.”
Al-Hassan, a father of three at the roundabout, says he spent hours looking for his companions, finally finding them in hospital. On a night of chaos and death, they had managed to find a single 25kg bag of flour.