At least 20 Palestinians were killed yesterday at an aid distribution site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), in what the US-backed group said was a crowd surge instigated by armed agitators.
The GHF, which is supported by Israel, said 19 people were trampled and one fatally stabbed during the crush at one of its centres in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
“We have credible reason to believe that elements within the crowd – armed and affiliated with Hamas – deliberately fomented the unrest,” GHF said in a statement.
Hamas rejected the GHF allegation as “false and misleading”, blaming the incident on the GHF and Israel’s military.
Witnesses told Reuters that guards at the site sprayed pepper gas at them after they had locked the gates to the centre, trapping them between the gates and the outer wire-fence.
“People kept gathering and pressuring each other; when people pushed each other...those who couldn’t stand fell under the people and were crushed,” said eyewitness Mahmoud Fojo, 21, who was hurt in the stampede.
“Some people started jumping over the netted fence and got wounded. We were injured, and God saved us. We were under the people and we said the Shahada (death prayers). We thought we were dying, finished,” he added.
There has been no immediate comment by the GHF or Israeli army on eyewitness accounts.
Palestinian health officials told Reuters that 21 people had died of suffocation at the site. One medic said lots of people had been crammed into a small space and had been crushed.
Gaza local health authorities said Israeli military strikes have killed at least 87 people across the enclave in the past 24 hours.
On Tuesday, the UN rights office in Geneva said it had recorded at least 875 killings within the past six weeks in the vicinity of aid sites and food convoys in Gaza – the majority of them close to GHF distribution points.
Most of those deaths were caused by gunfire that locals have blamed on the Israeli military. The military has acknowledged that Palestinian civilians were harmed near aid distribution centres, saying that Israeli forces had been issued new instructions with “lessons learned”.
Amjad Al Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, yesterday accused the GHF of gross mismanagement.
“People who flock in their thousands (to GHF sites) are hungry and exhausted, and they get squeezed into narrow places, amid shortages of aid and the absence of organisation and discipline by the GHF,” he said.
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