Occupation opens fire on crowd awaiting aid in north Gaza, killing over 100

104 Palestinians were killed and at least 700 injured in north Gaza on Thursday as they waited for the first humanitarian aid delivery in more than a month to reach the area, which is threatened by famine, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Occupation forces opened fire on a crowd on Thursday morning near Dawar al-Nabulsi, Rasheed street, in the north of the besieged strip.

“As soon as the trucks arrived, people started moving towards them to receive some aid. However, suddenly and without warning, the Occupation army — stationed in several areas around where we were located — started to shoot at hungry members of the public,” said Motassem, an eyewitness to the incident, to Mada Masr.

Israel has obstructed aid deliveries from the two border crossings to Gaza’s south, while a number of trucks bound for north Gaza have been targeted directly by airstrikes.

But with over half a million Palestinians still residing in northern Gaza, multiple deaths over the past period have been caused by the severe lack of medicine, food and water, medical sources told Wafa earlier this week.

Motassem explained that he, along with others in the north, had waited since noon on Wednesday on Rasheed Street, the main road overlooking the sea, anticipating aid expected to be delivered to the northern Gaza valley, an area that includes Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip. 

Hours went by with thousands of people waiting on the street overlooking the sea, until a number of trucks arrived at dawn on Thursday.

“I saw dozens of people collapsing around me, threw what was in my hand and started running haphazardly until I and a number of other people reached a hill and hid behind  it. We threw ourselves on the floor and waited for the shooting to end. These couple of moments felt like years,” Matassem added.

Moatassem described dozens of dead bodies on the floor and aid boxes stained with blood.

A relative of Thaer Aoun, who contributed to this report, was also severely injured in the incident. Aoun told Mada Masr that Abdallah, who is under 20 years of age, had walked a long distance to try and get food for the family from Rasheed Street. An Israeli soldier shot him in the back. Aoun described his cousin as currently "battling death."

The Occupation army claimed on X on Thursday that dozens were injured after being crushed and trampled as citizens rushed to obtain the trucks' contents.

Conditions in the north of the Gaza Strip have grown increasingly severe over recent weeks due to a lack of resources, with Occupation soldiers killing dozens of people trying to obtain aid in similar incidents taking place on Salah Eddin Street and Rasheed Street over recent days.

The World Food Programme announced last week that it had temporarily suspended aid deliveries to northern Gaza until conditions in the besieged strip allow for safe distribution, due to Israel’s obstruction of aid and targeting of aid trucks. 

It said at the time that it had only undertaken one delivery operation over a three-week period, which had been met with chaos and confusion as well as gunfire as hungry people tried to obtain access to the aid by force.

Residents in northern Gaza who have not been displaced to the south organized several protests over the past few weeks demanding the entry of food and water. The most recent was in Jabalia Camp.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced on Saturday that its last aid delivery was on January 23.

On Monday, the Israeli War Cabinet “approved” the direct entry of humanitarian aid into the northern Gaza Strip from Israel for what it said would be the first such delivery since October 7. All other deliveries have entered Gaza from the south. 

It did not provide any further information on the delivery, however.

Aid deliveries have also been assaulted by members of the public in southern Gaza. Sources cited a depletion in the numbers of Hamas police able to secure aid trucks due to the Occupation directly targeting its officers. They described a breakdown in social order contributing to increasingly chaotic scenes in Rafah.

Israeli and US officials told Axios that the Occupation government has refused to stop targeting Hamas police, despite US warnings that the continued practice opens the door for armed groups to attack and loot aid trucks.

UNRWA has warned of a looming famine but said it could still be averted if regular food convoys were allowed into northern Gaza.

Agency Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said on Sunday that the agency’s “calls to send food aid have been denied and have fallen on deaf ears,” emphasizing that what the Palestinians are being subjected to in the north of the strip is a “man-made disaster.”

“It's the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded. What that means is that children are starving at the fastest rate that the world has ever known,” said Melanie Ward, CEO of the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, to ITV on Monday.