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At least 27 Palestinians were killed and dozens injured on Tuesday after Israeli troops opened fire near an aid centre in Rafah, health officials said – the third day running of bloodshed during humanitarian operations inside Gaza.
Israel’s military said its forces had opened fire on a group viewed as a threat for leaving a designated access route, and denied targeting civilians.
Volker Turk, head of the United Nations human rights office in Geneva, said the impediment of access to food relief for civilians might constitute a war crime and described attacks on people trying to access food aid as “unconscionable”. He called for an prompt and impartial investigation into the killings.
Israeli warplanes as well as forces on the ground targeted crowds near a distribution centre run by the US-based and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the Palestinian Authority’s Wafa news agency reported.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said its field hospital in Rafah had received 184 casualties, adding that 19 of those were dead upon arrival, and eight died of their wounds shortly after. Video showed injured people, including at least one woman, being rushed to a medical centre on carts drawn by donkeys.
The shooting took place at the same location where witnesses say Israeli forces fired at crowds a day earlier.
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The individuals were moving towards forces in a way that “posed a threat to [the soldiers]”, the military said, adding that the incident occurred some distance away from the aid distribution site in a “closed military zone”.
The deaths came hours after Israel said three of its soldiers had been killed in fighting in northern Gaza, as its forces pushed ahead with a months-long offensive against Hamas militants that has laid much of the enclave to waste.
The GHF’s aid plan has been criticised by both the UN and established aid charities, which say it does not follow humanitarian principles. In particular they have questioned GHF’s biometric scanning policies, which Israel says are designed to prevent Hamas from profiting from aid, and say the foundation is unable to meet the mounting needs of the territory’s roughly 2 million people.
The private group said it distributed 21 truckloads of food early on Tuesday and that the aid operation was “conducted safely and without incident within the site”.
The GHF’s distribution of aid, which began last week, has been marred by chaos, and multiple witnesses have reported incidents of Israeli troops firing on crowds near the delivery sites.
On Sunday, Palestinian and international officials reported that at least 31 people were killed and dozens more injured. Israel’s military dismissed those reports as “fabrications” by Hamas.
On Monday, three more Palestinians were reportedly killed by Israeli fire.
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Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer denied that civilians had been targeted. “The IDF is doing everything in its power to allow Gazans to get to the humanitarian aid. The IDF is not preventing the arrival of Gazans at humanitarian aid sites. Indeed, we are encouraging it,” he said.
The UN has described Gaza as the “hungriest place on Earth” and said Israel is allowing only a “trickle” of food into the enclave.
As a small flow of aid has resumed, Israeli forces – now in control of large parts of Gaza – have kept up attacks on various targets around the enclave, killing more than 3,900 Palestinians since a two-month ceasefire collapsed in mid-March, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
More than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s air and ground war, Gaza health authorities say. The offensive was launched following a Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023, during which around 1,200 people were killed – most of them civilians – and 251 hostages were captured.
