Extract from ABC News
Some Palestinians injured in a Gaza aid delivery disaster have said Israeli forces shot them as they rushed to get food for their families, describing a scene of terror and chaos.
Health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza said 115 people were killed and more than 750 injured in the incident on Thursday, attributing the deaths to Israeli fire and calling it a massacre.
Israel disputed those figures and said most victims were trampled or run over.
Four witnesses, who spoke at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in a video obtained by the Reuters news agency, said they were fired upon by Israeli forces, some describing tanks and armed drones being involved.
Mahmoud Ahmad said he began waiting on Wednesday evening for the convoy that eventually arrived on Thursday morning.
He said hunger forced him to take the risk of going to the delivery route in hopes of getting flour for his children.
As the aid trucks came into northern Gaza he went towards them but, he said, a tank and a "quadcopter" drone began to fire.
"I was injured in my back. I was bleeding for an hour until one of my relatives came and took me to hospital," he said.
"When the aid entered, the tank and quadcopter started firing at the people gathered, the people who went to get food for themselves and their children. They started shooting at them."
Jihad Mohammed said he was waiting at Nabulsi roundabout on the Al-Rashid coast road, the main delivery route into northern Gaza from the south.
"We went and waited for the trucks and then there was firing at all the people and then I was injured," he said.
Asked if he believed Israeli forces had fired on them deliberately, he said: "Yes, that's right. They used tanks, soldiers, aircraft … all were firing towards us."
Sami Mohammed was at the Al-Rashid road with his son, waiting for the aid convoy to arrive.
"My son ran to the beach and they shot him twice … one grazed his head and the other hit his chest," he said. He said bullets and shells were fired.
The boy was lying in a hospital bed with bandages on his chest and arm and a cut on his face.
Gaza doctor says most wounds at his hospital were from gunshots
The head of a Gaza City hospital that treated some of the Palestinians wounded in the bloodshed surrounding the aid convoy told the Associated Press news agency that more than 80 per cent had been struck by gunfire, suggesting there was heavy shooting by Israeli troops.
Dr Mohammed Salha, the acting director of Al-Awda Hospital, said that of the 176 wounded brought to the facility, 142 had gunshot wounds and the other 34 showed injuries from a stampede.
He could not address the cause of death of those killed, because the bodies were taken to government-run hospitals to be counted.
Dr Husam Abu Safyia, director of Gaza's Kamal Adwan Hospital, said the majority of the injured taken there had gunshot wounds in the upper part of their bodies, and many of the deaths were from gunshots to the head, neck or chest.
UN humanitarian agency OCHA said a UN team visited Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Friday to deliver medical supplies and meet people injured in the incident.
"By the time of the team's visit, the hospital had also received the bodies of more than 70 people who had been killed," it said.
Divergent accounts of deadly aid incident
An Israeli official said on Thursday there had been two incidents, hundreds of metres apart.
In the first, dozens were killed or injured as they tried to take aid from the trucks and were trampled or run over.
He said there was a second, subsequent incident as the trucks moved off. Some people in the crowd approached troops, who felt under threat and opened fire, killing an unknown number in a "limited response", he said.
He dismissed the casualty toll given by Gaza authorities but gave no figure himself.
In a later briefing on Thursday, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari also said dozens had been trampled to death or injured in a fight to take supplies off the trucks.
He said tanks escorting the trucks had subsequently fired warning shots to disperse the crowd and backed away when events began to get out of hand.
"No IDF strike was conducted towards the aid convoy," he said.
Biden approves military airdrops of aid
The United States will begin airdropping emergency humanitarian assistance into Gaza, US President Joe Biden said a day after the aid convoy incident.
Mr Biden said the airdrops would begin soon and that the US was looking into additional ways to facilitate getting badly needed aid into the war-battered territory to ease the suffering of Palestinians.
"In the coming days, we're going to join with our friends in Jordan and others who are providing airdrops of additional food and supplies," and would "seek to open up other avenues in, including possibly a marine corridor", Mr Biden said.
He twice referred to airdrops to help Ukraine, but White House officials clarified that he was referring to Gaza.
Mr Biden made his announcement while hosting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the White House.
"Aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough," he said.
"Now, it's nowhere nearly enough. Innocent lives are on the line and children's lives are on the line. We won't stand by until we get more aid in there. We should be getting hundreds of trucks in, not just several."
The White House, US State Department and Pentagon had been weighing the merits of US military airdrops of assistance for several months, but had held off due to concerns that the method was inefficient, had no way of ensuring the aid got to civilians in need and could not make up for overland aid deliveries.
Administration officials said their preference was to further increase overland aid deliveries through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom border points and to try to get Israel to open the Erez Crossing into northern Gaza.
The incident on Thursday appeared to tip the balance and push Mr Biden to approve airdrops. White House national security spokesman John Kirby said that airdrops were difficult operations, but the acute need for aid in Gaza informed the president's decision.
He stressed that ground routes would continue to be used to get aid into Gaza and that the airdrops were a supplemental effort.
"It's not the kind of thing you want to do in a heartbeat. You want to think it through carefully," Mr Kirby said.
He added: "There's few military operations that are more complicated than humanitarian assistance airdrops."
Pressure has been mounting for Mr Biden to move more aggressively to ease Palestinian suffering, including from within the Democratic Party.
Egypt, France, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have already used airdrops to get aid into Gaza since the conflict started in October.
Mr Biden said earlier this week that a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas could be reached by Monday, before tempering his optimism after Thursday's incident.
But on Friday, he said he still held hope that a deal could be struck, possibly before Muslims around the globe begin observing the holy month of Ramadan that is expected to begin on March 10.
EU agrees on conditions to give $50m to UN agency for Gaza
The European Union said that it would pay 50 million euros ($83 million) to the main UN provider of aid in Gaza next week after the agency agreed to allow EU-appointed experts to audit the way it screens staff to identify extremists.
The UNRWA agency is reeling from allegations that 12 of its 13,000 Gaza staff members participated in the October 7 Hamas attacks in southern Israel.
The agency fired the employees, but more than a dozen countries, including Australia, suspended funding worth about $US450 million ($689 million), almost half its budget for 2024.
The EU's executive branch, the European Commission, had been due to disburse 82 million euros ($136 million) to UNRWA on February 29, but wanted the agency to accept its terms for an audit. The commission is the third-biggest donor to UNRWA after the US and Germany.
The commission said two further tranches of funding worth 16 million euros ($27 million) each would be given to UNRWA, which is on the brink of financial collapse, as it complies with the agreement.
AP/Reuters
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