The disaster that unfolded Thursday marked a new low in the Gaza Strip’s unfolding calamity.
Local authorities said more than 100 people were killed and more than
700 others injured, accusing Israeli forces of opening fire on a crowd
of people in devastated Gaza City waiting for humanitarian aid. An IDF
official acknowledged
that IDF troops on one end of the convoy fired at members of the crowd
who were approaching in, what they called, a threatening manner but said
many Palestinians died in a stampede as they sought to reach trucks
carrying vital aid. The grisly incident encapsulates much of the
horror of the moment in Gaza, a territory that has been pulverized by
the Israeli military campaign that followed Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 strike
on southern Israel. On social media, observers and journalists
described the scene as the “flour massacre.” Overwhelmed, semi-destroyed
hospitals in Gaza absorbed a new influx of hundreds of wounded
civilians, many of whose injuries, officials told my colleagues, were inflicted by gunfire.
More than 30,000 people
in Gaza have been killed since the ongoing war began. Hunger and
disease stalk the land and drive countless Gazans on the sort of
desperate, daily searches for food and water that can end in the scenes
witnessed Thursday. The bulk of Gaza’s more than 2 million people face
the prospect of famine — a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest
decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid
groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance
into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent
Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid.
“We must be clear: civilians in Gaza are falling sick from hunger and
thirst because of Israel’s entry restrictions,” Jan Egeland, chief of
the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in an email statement after a recent
visit to Gaza. “Life-saving supplies are being intentionally blocked,
and women and children are paying the price.”
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Hopes are dimming for an
imminent diplomatic breakthrough that could see Hamas free its remaining
hostages and hostilities cease. This week, it emerged that the Biden administration may even be contemplating airdropping aid into Gaza,
given the delays and difficulties in supplying vital food and other
goods over land crossings. Some analysts couldn’t help but consider the irony
of the United States dropping supplies onto a population that’s seeking
respite from months of Israeli attacks with U.S.-made munitions. Such
measures would “mostly serve to relieve the guilty consciences of senior
U.S. officials whose policies are contributing to the ongoing
atrocities and risk of famine in Gaza,” said Scott Paul, Oxfam’s humanitarian director, in a statement. A
number of top U.N. officials voiced their alarm Thursday. “I am
appalled at the reported killing and injury of hundreds of people during
a transfer of aid supplies west of Gaza City today,” Martin Griffiths,
the U.N.’s lead humanitarian officer, said. “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned
of an “unknown number of people” — believed to be in the tens of
thousands — lying under the rubble of buildings brought down by Israeli
strikes. Volker Turk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said
about one in 20 people in Gaza is now dead or wounded in remarks made in Geneva. He also detailed the suffering of the living. “All
people in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine. Almost all are drinking
salty and contaminated water. Health care across the territory is barely
functioning,” he said. “Just imagine what this means for the wounded,
and people suffering infectious-disease outbreaks. In northern Gaza,
where the operational space for humanitarian work is now almost zero,
many are already believed to be starving. In all other parts of Gaza,
humanitarian assistance has become extremely challenging — and this is
not only dangerous, but also dehumanizing.” |