U.N. condemns U.S. aid system in Gaza after Israel opens fire on crowd

JERUSALEM — A U.S.- and Israeli-backed process for distributing aid in the Gaza Strip faced growing criticism Wednesday after scores of Palestinians were wounded across two days of deliveries. Fearful, desperate crowds thronged locations where food was being handed out, underscoring the scale of the hunger crisis in the besieged and shattered enclave.

U.N. officials said that as many as 50 people appeared to have been shot and injured near the private aid distribution site in the southern city of Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan neighborhood Tuesday, and that crowds had overrun a World Food Program distribution site near Deir al-Balah in central Gaza on Wednesday, sacking it for individual bags of flour, before themselves being attacked by armed looters.

“Initial reports indicate two people died and several were injured in the tragic incident,” WFP said in a statement. A health official at the nearby al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, Eyad Amawi, said later that three people had been killed.

“Humanitarian needs have spiraled out of control after 80 days of complete blockade of all food assistance and other aid into Gaza,” WFP said.

Israel has barred nearly all food and medical supplies from entering Gaza since March 2, leaving parts of the population on the brink of starvation. The newly launched aid program is run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a controversial private organization that began distributing food in Gaza this week. The mechanism is Israeli-approved, secured by private contractors backed by the United States and bypasses the U.N. system for providing relief.

Internal planning documents from November show that even then, the founders of GHF anticipated pushback, preparing preemptive talking points in case they encountered allegations likening the food hubs to “‘concentration camps’ with biometrics” or comparing the organization to Blackwater, a former U.S. mercenary firm implicated in violence against civilians in Iraq.

At a news conference Wednesday, Jonathan Whittall, the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Gaza, described the first site to which the often distraught and hungry Palestinians had run as “a militarized distribution point established on the rubble of their homes.”

“The newly developed distribution scheme is more than just the control of aid. It is engineered scarcity,” Whittall said.

The timing and circumstances of the Israeli troops’ opening fire Tuesday remained unclear. Two eyewitnesses quoted by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that crowds had swelled through the day as news of the aid distribution spread, leading Israeli troops to open fire from their positions around al-Alam Square, about a half-mile from the distribution site, around 4:30 p.m. local time.

The military said that it had fired “warning shots in the area outside the compound” and that “control over the situation was established.” By nighttime, the International Committee of the Red Cross later reported, the staff at one of its field hospitals had treated an influx of casualties, including women and children, all with gunshot wounds.

Footage of the incident showed a large number of people rushing toward the hub, with part of a fence torn down. A military helicopter was also seen firing flares from the sky, and video from the scene, verified by The Washington Post, appeared to show people running in a panic near the site. The snap of gunfire can be heard in the distance as the crowd scrambles.

The GHF said in a statement that the American private contractors securing the aid site were forced to briefly withdraw as chaos erupted Tuesday, allowing “a few residents to take aid.” The organization denied that any shots were fired at Palestinians inside its distribution site. A person close to the operation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the press, said the crowd was so large by that point that the contractors feared a stampede was possible.

On Wednesday, the foundation said that it had continued to distribute aid through one of its other hubs in southern Gaza “without incident,” adding that it would continue to scale up its four sites and build additional ones.

The scenes of desperation drew widespread criticism, particularly from the U.N. agencies and relief organizations that, before Israel imposed a two-month-long blockade on the enclave in early March, had been delivering aid to Gaza under a weeks-long ceasefire.

“We warned this would happen, and now it’s unraveling before our eyes. What is being presented as a humanitarian mechanism is, in reality, a system of control,” said Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam’s policy lead for the Palestinian territories.

“It strips aid agencies of independence, denies Palestinians their right to aid and places life-or-death decisions in the hands of a party to the conflict,” she said. “It violates the core principles of humanitarian action and turns aid into a weapon of war.”

The majority of aid organizations and all U.N. agencies had refused to sign up to participate in GHF’s system, saying that it violates humanitarian principles and could be used to forcibly displace Palestinians by making them move closer to the distribution hubs in the south.

Two senior officials with GHF resigned this week, with one saying the group’s plans were inconsistent with what he called the “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.”

U.N. officials said Israel has continued to allow the entrance of some U.N. aid trucks, despite GHF — which Israel has slated to take over all aid operations in Gaza — starting work this week. In a news conference Wednesday, U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said that the organization and its partner agencies had only been able to collect aid from 200 of the 900 trucks that they had submitted to Israel for approval.

“Israeli authorities also continue to deny our attempts to coordinate humanitarian movements inside Gaza, including one to retrieve fuel from Rafah today,” he said. “Overall, all six coordinated movements were denied to the United Nations today.”

It is not clear how long Israel will continue to allow the U.N. to distribute its own aid, rather than switching to the GHF system. Humanitarian groups say that at least 20 percent of households in Gaza are unlikely to have anyone who can safely travel to a distribution point. Some Palestinians reported Wednesday that fear of the chaos was making them stay at home.

“This is not humanitarianism. Humanitarian action would seek to reach all civilians wherever they are, and would push back on measures to limit aid,” Whittall said. “We are being denied from doing so, because it appears that the intention from Israel is not to facilitate an efficient aid response at scale.”

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.