World leaders on Friday stepped up their demands for Israel to send more aid to Gaza and provide more answers for the deaths of scores of Palestinians amid chaos surrounding a humanitarian convoy its forces were securing.
Many questions remained unanswered as the Israeli military and Gaza officials offered diverging accounts of one of the deadliest known disasters involving civilians in the nearly five-month war. Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, called on the Israeli military to “fully explain” the killings in northern Gaza on Thursday and joined calls for a ceasefire that would allow the release of Israeli hostages and allow more aid to enter the ground. .
“People in Gaza are closer to death than life,” he said on social media. “More humanitarian aid must come. Immediately”.
France’s foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, called for an independent investigation and said the deadly chaos surrounding the convoy was the result of a humanitarian disaster that left Gazans “struggling for food.”
“What is happening is indefensible and unjustified,” Mr Cezournet told France Inter on Friday. “Israel must be able to hear this and must stop.”
The disaster unfolded on Thursday morning as thousands of hungry people gathered near a food convoy in Gaza City, with Israeli troops and tanks nearby. It was an increasingly common scene in Gaza, where Palestinians fighting hunger amid Israel’s war against Hamas regularly gather around the relatively small number of aid trucks allowed in the area.
What happened next is still unclear. Gaza health officials say Israeli troops fired into the crowd, killing more than 100 people and injuring 700 others in what they called a “massacre.” An Israeli army spokesman said soldiers opened fire “when the mob moved in a way that put them at risk.” The military said most of the deaths were caused by trampling and that people had also been run over by aid trucks.
Neither account could be independently verified, and in part drone footage released by the Israeli military, along with social media footage of the scene analyzed by The New York Times, do not fully explain the sequence of events. Videos show people crawling and ducking for cover. A hospital in Gaza City said it received the bodies of at least a dozen people who were shot and treated more than 100 people with gunshot wounds.
An Israeli army spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, told Britain’s Channel 4 that soldiers provided security for the convoy, which included private vehicles distributing food supplies from international donors. Israel is under increasing international pressure to facilitate more aid deliveries as groups including the United Nations relief agency for the Palestinians – the main group distributing humanitarian supplies to Gaza – say it has become too lawless and chaotic to operate on a large scale. part of the territory, especially North.
Samantha Power, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development, said that regardless of how they died, it was clear that people were killed or injured while trying to find food for their families.
“This can’t happen,” he said. “Desperate citizens trying to feed their starving families should not be shot.”
He urged Israel to open more border crossings to ease aid reaching northern Gaza and ease customs restrictions that he said let flour sit in ports while people near starvation.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry called on world leaders to impose sanctions on Israel to force it to protect civilians and ensure their humanitarian needs, arguing that it was obliged to do so under international law as an occupying power.
“They completely denied the truth of the massacre they committed against unarmed civilians exhausted by hunger and thirst as a result of racist policies,” the ministry said in a statement on Friday.
Refugees International, an advocacy group, demanded an immediate independent investigation into the disaster and called on the United States to freeze military aid to Israel until those responsible are held accountable.
“There is nothing that justifies the killing of civilians who are desperate to receive life-saving aid for their families,” the organization said in a statement.
