UN trucks delivering food to Gaza were stopped and looted overnight, Gaza residents and merchants said yesterday, hours after desperate Palestinians overran a distribution site run by a US-backed group trying to start delivering aid.
The incidents underscore the problems getting supplies to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians facing worsening hunger and starvation after a weeks-long Israeli blockade, as Israel continues intensive military operations in Gaza.
On Tuesday, Israeli troops fired warning shots as crowds rushed to a distribution point run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-backed group that began supplying aid under a new system which Israel hopes will prevent aid reaching Hamas.
The foundation said it continued its operations yesterday without incident and had opened a second distribution site.
In a statement, the foundation also disputed that a distribution site had been overrun on Tuesday, saying its team had relaxed security protocols briefly “to safeguard against crowd reactions to finally receiving food”, and that no shots had been fired at crowds or beneficiaries injured.
The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said yesterday that Israel’s model for providing aid to Gaza was wasteful and a “distraction from atrocities”, criticising a chaotic distribution by a US-backed foundation this week.
“We have seen yesterday the shocking images of hungry people pushing against fences, desperate for food. It was chaotic, undignified and unsafe,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini told reporters at the Japan National Press Club in Tokyo.
The United Nations and other international aid groups have refused to take part in the new distribution scheme, saying it violates the principle that aid should be distributed neutrally, based only on need.
As the new system began, the Israeli military also allowed 95 trucks belonging to the UN and other aid groups into the enclave, but three Gaza residents and three merchants said a number of trucks were targeted by looters.
One Palestinian transport operator said at least 20 trucks belonging to the UN World Food Programme were attacked shortly before midnight.
“Some trucks made it through, then it seems that people became aware of that,” one witness told Reuters.
“They woke up, some placed barriers on the road, intercepted and stole the goods.”
Israeli forces, which resumed their operation in Gaza in March following a brief truce, continued strikes yesterday, killing at least 30 people including eight members of the family of a local journalist, Palestinian health officials said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that Israel’s killing of Hamas-Gaza chief Mohammad Sinwar marked a turn towards the “complete defeat of Hamas”, adding that Israel was “taking control of food distribution” in Gaza.
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