At least 20 Palestinians have been killed in a crush at a food distribution site in southern Gaza run by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It happened after GHF guards used teargas or pepper spray on hungry crowds arriving at the centre, Palestinian health authorities and witnesses said.
Nineteen people were crushed and one stabbed in a “chaotic and dangerous surge” on Wednesday morning, GHF said in a statement. It did not respond to questions about the use of pepper spray or teargas by its staff at the site near Khan Younis.
Fifteen people died from suffocation after teargas was fired at the crowd, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement.
“All of the 15 arrived at the hospital already dead with obvious symptoms of lack of oxygen. You can see blue marks, vomit, blue lips, swelling faces – all symptoms of suffocation,” Dr Mohammed Zaqqout, the director of hospitals for Gaza, said. “We couldn’t save any of the 15 we received because they were already dead on arrival.”
The deaths marked a grim milestone for Palestinians in a war where Israeli attacks have already killed more than 58,000 people, the majority of them civilians. On Tuesday 13 members of the same family, including seven children, were reported killed when an Israeli airstrike hit their home in eastern Gaza City. Some of the victims were left to die under the rubble, as the Israeli military prevented rescuers from approaching the scene for roughly eight hours with the use of drone strikes, local rescue workers and family members told the Haaretz newspaper.
Israeli forces have killed at least 800 Palestinians while they were trying to access food since the GHF began operations in late May. Many of them were trying to reach a GHF distribution site. The deaths on Wednesday were the first at a site controlled by the organisation’s armed security guards. Gaza health authorities also said they were the first “due to suffocation and severe stampedes”.
“This is a mechanism for killing,” Zaqqout said. “No one would risk his life unless he is starving and doesn’t care if he dies in the attempt to get something to eat. This is the worst kind of humiliation a human being can suffer.”
GHF, a startup organisation with no experience of distributing food in complex conflict zones, says it bears no responsibility for deaths outside its perimeters. The Trump administration announced on Tuesday it would donate $30m (£22m) to the organisation, a move decried as “outrageous” by the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen.
Van Hollen referred to GHF as a “shadowy group at the centre of the scheme to replace humanitarian aid orgs in Gaza with mercenaries, leading to the killing of starving civilians trying to collect food”.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for this outrage,” the senator said in a social media post.
In one video posted on social media, which could not immediately be verified, a man described guards throwing teargas at crowds who were already out of breath from the race to get limited aid.
“I was running like everybody else to reach the gate [to the site],” he said. “People were crushing each other at the gate and they [the guards] started throwing teargas at us.”
GHF said it identified people with weapons in the crowd for the first time since starting operations, and confiscated one gun.
It claimed, without providing details or evidence, that people with Hamas links “fomented unrest”.
The organisation runs only four sites to feed 2 million people, in a territory where extreme hunger is widespread and food security experts have warned of looming famine. Food security experts say deaths are inevitable in a system with only four sites, which open for short, irregular periods, providing food for hundreds of thousands of desperately hungry people.
Under the aid model run by the UN and major international humanitarian organisations, which fed Palestinians during nearly 20 months of war, there were more than 400 aid distribution points used to bring food into communities.
Israeli authorities claimed they needed a new aid system because Hamas was diverting aid, but have not provided evidence to back up allegations that closely audited supply chains of UN and humanitarian agencies were compromised.
Malak A Tantesh in Gaza and William Christou in Beirut contributed reporting