What is known about Gaza aid truck casualties in the Israel-Hamas conflict

After scores of Palestinians were murdered in a rush for help in Gaza on Thursday, conflicting reports surfaced. The health ministry in the Hamas-run enclave claimed that Israeli soldiers had shot the victims, while the army insisted that the deaths were the result of a stampede.

Did Israeli soldiers start shooting?
Thousands of Palestinians who were in extreme need of food surged towards relief trucks at the western Nabulsi roundabout in Gaza City, sparking violence, according to a witness who spoke to AFP from the city.

The witness, who wished to remain anonymous for security concerns, said that “trucks full of aid came too close to some army tanks that were in the area, and the crowd, thousands of people, just stormed the trucks.”

“When people approached the tanks too closely, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd.”

In the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Hamas, the health ministry said that 104 people had been shot dead and 760 injured.

The head of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City, Hossam Abu Safiya, said that “bullets and shrapnel from occupation forces” were the cause of all the fatalities.

“Thousands of people” were involved in the first rush, according to an Israeli military spokesman, during which “dozens of Gazans were injured and killed, some of them run over by the trucks.”

At that point, a portion of the convoy made it to its destination.

“Dozens of civilians rushed to the trucks, approached the tanks and the forces nearby,” according to the source.

“After firing warning rounds into the air, soldiers opened fire on anybody who did not retreat and constituted a danger.

“We had a limited reaction and fire, I can say that. From our vantage point, it was not a really significant occurrence.”

The Israeli army published aerial photos that purportedly showed throngs of Gaza residents around relief vehicles in Gaza City.

At Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, mourners were gathered around corpses covered in white shrouds, according to AFP photos.

After two hours of waiting, violence broke out for Ali Awad Ashqir, who had gone to fetch some wheat for his famished family.

“The trucks started to show up at around 4:00 in the morning. The occupying army opened fire with artillery bombs and firearms as soon as they arrived,” he told AFP.

Has aid been looted by the Gazans before?
The World Food Programme said on February 20 that it was once again stopping food supplies to northern Gaza due to two convoys being robbed and attacked by desperate Palestinians, despite the fact that there remained widespread hunger.

These two convoys represented the first in almost a week.

A convoy had to repel “multiple attempts by people trying to climb aboard our trucks, then facing gunfire once we entered Gaza City” on February 18, according to the UN agency.

“Several trucks were looted… and a truck driver was beaten,” on February 19. High tension and explosive hostility accompanied the spontaneous distribution of the leftover flour from the trucks in Gaza City “it continued.

Why do Gazans need so much?
Aid workers have been alerting the world for months to the dire circumstances facing Gazan residents, and on Monday a representative of the UN agency OCHA declared widespread famine to be “almost inevitable”.

According to UN estimates, 2.2 million people, or the great majority of the population in the Gaza Strip, are at risk of starvation, mostly in the northern regions around Gaza City.

In February, little over 2,300 relief trucks entered the Gaza Strip, a decrease of around 50% from January, according to UNRWA, the UN organization for Palestinian refugees.

Compared to the roughly 500 trucks that entered each day before to the war, it is an average of far less than 100 trucks every day.

Who planned the convoy for Thursday?
A senior UN relief official said that the supply convoy was not organized by any UN organization, but the Israeli military officer did not explain who was in charge of it.

The chief of UNRWA, the primary UN relief organization in Gaza, Philippe Lazzarini, said in a post on X that “neither UNRWA nor any other UN agency were involved in this distribution.”