What happened?
At dawn, 4:30am on 29 February 2024, a convoy of food aid trucks arrived southwest of Gaza City where people had congregated at the Nabulsi Roundabout on Harun Al-Rashid Street. They were instantly surrounded by desperate Palestinians, who began unloading aid from the trucks. Israeli tanks and snipers opened fire on the crowd, killing at least 112 people and injuring another 750.
Al-Jazeera reported the multiple shooting events:
As people gathered in large groups waiting for much-needed aid, they were shot at by all kinds of military equipment, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reported from Rafah. According to a report by the Associated Press, people pulled boxes of flour and canned goods off the trucks.
After the first round of shooting stopped, people returned to the trucks, only for the soldiers to open fire once more.
“After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,” Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul said, reporting from the scene.
According to Al Jazeera’s [Hani] Mahmoud, the more he spoke to people, “the clearer it became they felt it was a trap, an ambush”.
“We had come here to get our hands on some aid. I have waiting since noon yesterday. At about 4:30 in the early morning trucks started to trickle in. The Israelis just opened random fire on us as if it was a trap. Once we approached the aid trucks, the Israeli tanks and warplanes started firing on us,” a witness at the scene told Al Jazeera.
Witnesses said that the stampede happened as a result of Israeli firing and that the trucks also rolled over wounded people, adding to the death toll. Al Jazeera has verified that donkey carts were used to take people to hospital because no ambulances could reach the area.
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/1/flour-massacre-how-gaza-food-killings-unfolded-and-israels-story-changed
What did Palestinian doctors say about the types of wounds?
Dr. Jadallah Ashafi at Shifa Hospital:
Dr. Mohammed Salha, the acting director of Al-Awda Hospital:
What Israel claimed had happened and how its story changed
Israel blamed the deaths and injuries on the Palestinian crowd stampeding and crushing people. It released aerial drone footage of Palestinians surrounding the trucks.
IDF Spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari claimed “As you can see, in this video, the tanks that were there to secure the convoy and cautiously tried to disperse the mob with a few warning shots.”
Note that the added IDF’s subtitles to the video (above, click to enlarge) also added words that the IDF dog did not actually say, appending the phrase “in the air” to describe the warning shots. Here is the full press release video:
This was the story the international media—who have no correspondents in Gaza, first went with (click for articles):
IDF Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner told FOX News that:
“We did not fire at the convoy, we did not attack the convoy. No, absolutely not. We fired in the air in order to disperse the masses and then towards some people that were approaching the tank and then we moved out… The mass event, the mass reality of casualties that HAMAS are reporting had nothing to do with Israel, if they even happened.”
He later added that some of the casualties (earlier “if they even happened”) were “run over” by the aid trucks.
Al-Jazeera also noted that the Israeli story changed as footage from the first livestreamed genocide in history flowed out in the aftermath and multiple doctor’s reports made it clear that they were treating victims of gunfire:
But the Israeli version of events changed over the course of the day.
Reporting from occupied East Jerusalem, Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith said the Israeli military “initially tried to pin the blame on the crowd”, saying that dozens were hurt as a consequence of being crushed and trampled in a stampede when aid trucks arrived.
“And then, after some pushing, the Israelis went on to say that their troops felt threatened, that hundreds of troops approached their troops in a way they posed a threat to them so they responded by opening fire,” Smith added. But they didn’t explain how those people posed a threat [to tanks—FACTIFADA added this note].
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/1/flour-massacre-how-gaza-food-killings-unfolded-and-israels-story-changed
So much back peddling went on that day that headlines and subheadlines began contradicting each other, as in this sign of the Times below:
Analysis of Israel’s claims
Josep Borrell Fontelles, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of European Commission, said “Last Thursday, over a hundred civilians were killed and many other wounded when desperately trying to get food from a convoy, many of them victims of the Israeli army fire during the ensuing stampede. The firing by Israeli soldiers against civilians trying to access foodstuff is unjustifiable.” Full statement:
Even Reuters got snarky with the Israelis, publishing this follow-up article today on 2 March 2024, opening with the sentence, “The Israeli military on Saturday promised an exhaustive and truthful investigation into the deaths of Palestinians queuing for aid in Gaza this week” and their photo editor illustrated it with a photo of Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari’s infamous “discovery of a HAMAS hostage-guarding roster” in Al-Rantissi Children’s hospital from 13 November 2023, which turned out to be a handmade calendar:
American inaction continues
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller laundered a variety of Israeli propaganda claims about the event, including that Israel may not have been responsible for the gunfire, expressing faith in Israel’s capacity to investigate itself and blaming HAMAS for everything.
This exchange showing Miller’s deflections from obvious truths about the reality on ground is how America at this point in history. At one point he even mistakenly called Said Arikat, Washington bureau chief for the Jerusalem-based newspaper Al-Quds, “HAMAS.”
Biden responded to the most recent Israeli public relations catastrophe by touting a US air drop of 38,000 meals to 2.3 million starving people, instead of making Israel simply open the border to allow aid trucks in unhindered.
When you add the current Gaza death toll of 30,200 to the 7,800 currently listed as “missing” presumed dead, buried under rubble, that’s one meal for every Gazan killed with US-supplied weapons.
Listen to Jeremy Konyndyk, President of Refugees International, a global humanitarian organization, who has previously served in the Biden and Obama administrations talking about the aid drops and current state of aid to Gaza:
The current aid truck trickle
Before October 7th and two million Palestinians in Gaza were intentionally made homeless by Israeli bombing, 500 aid trucks entered Gaza daily to address the needs of 80 percent of the Gazan population.
Israel has been trickling aid trucks in at a rate of less than 100 a day, sometimes less than that in a week. Since the ICJ issued its ruling on 26 January 2024 in its genocide case and ordered Israel to prevent any acts of genocide, Israel has reduced the trickle, sometimes to none at all.
America’s aid drops are functionally ineffective, media event fig leaves for its partnership in Israel’s genocide.
Why air drops aren’t the answer, according to aid experts
Dave Harden is a former USAID Assistant Administrator for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance in the Obama Administration, and led USAID operations in the West Bank and Gaza, Iraq and Yemen from 2005 to 2018.
Scott Paul is Humanitarian Policy Lead at Oxfam America. During his tenure at Oxfam, Paul spearheaded the organization’s work on acute crises including those in Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Myanmar, and Bangladesh.
Read more about this issue in FACTIFADA By Topic: Aid to Gaza.
Scottish OG from the time of the First Intifada and the birth of the international movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people • Former Friends of Birzeit University Coordinator • Birzeit University Public Relations Officer • Cofounder and Editor of the original Electronic Intifada website • Creator of countless websites for pro-Palestinian organizations around the world via nigelparry.net
