Israel opens fire as Palestinians gather desperate for humanitarian aid to Gaza

BarcelonaAt least three dead, 47 injured, and seven missing. This is the official Palestinian casualty toll this Tuesday at the humanitarian aid distribution point in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, after the Israeli army used live fire to disperse the hungry crowd trying to get food. Chaos marked the first day of aid distribution by the Palestinians. the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Fund, controlled by the US and Israel and working with American private military companies. The Gaza government has called the events a "deliberate massacre."

"What happened today in Rafah is a deliberate massacre and a full-blown war crime, committed in cold blood against civilians weakened by more than 90 days of siege-induced hunger," the press office of the Hamas-run Gaza government denounced in a statement. When hundreds of desperate Palestinians jumped the fences and pounced on boxes of humanitarian aid, the army responded with live ammunition.

The Israeli army claimed in an earlier statement that only warning shots were fired, while authorities in the Strip say civilians were fired. "The employment forces [...] have opened live fire on starving civilians lured to these locations under the pretext of receiving aid: desperate individuals driven by extreme hunger," they said in their statement.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Gaza Humanitarian Fund said it had distributed some 8,000 boxes of food, equivalent to about 462,000 meals, after a nearly three-month Israeli blockade that has left thousands of children and adults malnourished. Some of the Palestinians who had been able to receive aid showed the contents of the packages, which included rice, flour, preserved beans, pasta, olive oil, cookies, and sugar.

Some footage showed lines of people walking through a corridor toward a large open field piled with aid. Other videos shared on social media showed large sections of the camp's fence torn down by people desperately trying to make their way to the food, Reuters reports. "What happened today is conclusive proof of the failure of the government to manage the humanitarian crisis it deliberately created through a policy of starvation, siege, and bombing," the Gaza government stated.

"You've been starving the entire population for almost three months, and then you ask them to walk miles and miles to get a sack of lentils and a sack of flour. This is not how humanitarian aid is distributed, especially by the state that occupied you: a country that destroyed the people of Rafah. The people it forced out of Rafah are now being told to go back and take whatever they can get," Ahmed Bayram of the Norwegian Refugee Council told Al Jazeera.

Humanitarian organizations and UN agencies have been criticizing for weeks the plan for the distribution of humanitarian aid devised by the United States and Israel that was launched this Tuesday, despite the fact that only two days ago, this Sunday, in The director resigned, claiming that he could not continue working because the criteria of "neutrality, impartiality and independence" were not met..

Israeli officials claimed that one advantage of this new aid system is that it includes a system to filter aid recipients to exclude anyone connected to Hamas. Humanitarian groups briefed on the foundation's plans say anyone accessing the aid will have to undergo facial recognition technology, which many Palestinians fear could end up in Israeli hands to be used to track and potentially target them.

"As much as I want to go because I'm hungry and my children are hungry, I'm very scared because they said the company belongs to Israel and mercenaries, and also because the resistance [Hamas] said not to go," Abu Ahmed, a 55-year-old father of seven, told Reuters in a WhatsApp message.

Details of exactly how the system will work have not been made public. The United Nations and other international aid groups have boycotted the foundation, saying it undermines the principle that humanitarian aid should be distributed by someone independent of the warring parties. "Humanitarian assistance should not be politicized or militarized," said Christian Cardon, chief spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.