Gaza says Israeli forces killed 27 people heading to aid site

Rafah: Palestinian health officials and witnesses say Israeli forces fired on people as they headed toward an aid distribution site on Tuesday, killing at least 27, in the third such incident in three days.

The army said it fired “near a few individual suspects” who left the designated route, approached its forces and ignored warning shots.

The near-daily shootings have come after an Israeli and US-backed foundation established aid distribution points inside Israeli military zones, a system it says is designed to circumvent Hamas. The United Nations has rejected the new system, saying it doesn’t address Gaza’s mounting hunger crisis and allows Israel to use aid as a weapon.

The Israeli military said it was looking into reports of casualties on Tuesday. It previously said it fired warning shots at suspects who approached its forces early Sunday and Monday, when health officials and witnesses said 34 people were killed.

The military denies opening fire on civilians or blocking them from reaching the aid sites. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which operates the sites, says there has been no violence in or around them. On Tuesday, it acknowledged that the Israeli military was investigating whether civilians were wounded “after moving beyond the designated safe corridor and into a closed military zone,” in an area that was “well beyond our secure distribution site.”

‘Either way we will die’

The shootings all occurred at the Flag Roundabout, around a kilometre from one of the GHF’s distribution sites in the now mostly uninhabited southern city of Rafah. The entire area is an Israeli military zone where journalists have no access outside of army-approved embeds.

Yasser Abu Lubda, a 50-year-old displaced from Rafah, said the shooting started around 4 am on Tuesday and that he saw several people killed or wounded.

Neima al-Aaraj, a woman from Khan Younis said that when she managed to reach the distribution site there was no aid left. “After the martyrs and wounded, I won’t return,” she said. “Either way we will die.”

Rasha al-Nahal, another witness, said “there was gunfire from all directions.” She said she counted more than a dozen dead and several wounded along the road.

When she reached the distribution site, she also found that there was no aid left, she said. So she gathered pasta from the ground and salvaged rice from a bag that had been dropped and

trampled upon.“We’d rather die than deal with this,” she said. “Death is more dignified than what’s happening to us.”

At least 27 people were killed early Tuesday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Hisham Mhanna, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross, confirmed the toll, saying its field hospital in Rafah received 184 wounded people, 19 of whom were declared dead on arrival and eight more who later died of their wounds. The 27 dead were transferred to Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Younis.

Jeremy Laurence, a spokesman for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva that it also had information indicating that 27 people were killed.