This post contains excerpts of an article originally published by Truthout.
Since the beginning of this war, I’ve seen aid trucks enter Gaza and when Palestinians, who are starving, go to get food, the IDF fires on them. It almost seems to be a game to them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they made bets about who could shoot the most people.
After the most recent shooting at one of the Israel/U.S. aid sites, the IDF claimed they had only fired “warning shots.” An investigation found bullets used by the IDF in the bodies of the dozens who were killed. Here is reporting on the investigation conducted by CNN:
A CNN investigation into a deadly incident near an aid distribution site in southern Gaza on Sunday points to the Israeli military opening fire on crowds of Palestinians as they tried to make their way to the fenced enclosure to get food.
More than a dozen eyewitnesses, including those wounded in the attack, said Israeli troops shot at crowds in volleys of gunfire that occurred sporadically through the early hours of Sunday morning. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the US and Israeli-backed aid initiative that runs the site, said that Israeli forces were operating in the area during the same period.
Multiple videos geolocated by CNN place the gunfire near a roundabout where hundreds of Palestinians had gathered about half a mile (800 meters) away from the militarized aid site in Tel al-Sultan in Rafah. The designated route to the site along the coast, Al-Rasheed Street, is in an area under the Israeli military’s control and Israeli troops operate at a base nearby.
Weapons experts said the rate of gunfire heard in the footage, as well as images of bullets retrieved from victims, were consistent with machine guns used by the Israeli military that can be mounted on tanks. Multiple eyewitnesses said that they saw gunfire emanating from Israeli tanks nearby.
None of the videos definitively show who fired shots outside of the aid camp. However, CNN’s review of audiovisual material sheds fresh light on how the pursuit of aid turned chaotic and then dangerous, on the actions of Israeli forces and the consequences of the new aid mechanism, which has been mired in controversy.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initially said on Sunday that its forces did not fire at civilians “while they were near or within the aid site.” An Israeli military source later acknowledged that troops had fired “warning shots” at suspects about 1 kilometer (1,093 yards) away.
The Israeli military declined to answer questions about CNN’s findings.
At this point, no one who’s been paying attention to this genocide should believe a word coming from the IDF. They have shot and bombed aid workers and journalists, with over 200 journalists killed (more than in WWI and WWII combined). IDF snipers have been targeting small children (U.S. doctors volunteering in Gaza reported the number of children coming into the ER with gunshots to the head.
They bombed a World Central kitchen envoy of 2 vehicles. After the first vehicle was bombed, survivors ran back to the second vehicle for cover before that one was bombed, killing all of them. These vehicles had clear logos and labels on the roofs and the IDF was aware of their routes as they had cleared them ahead of time.
Those are just a few of the war crimes committed by the “world’s most moral army.”
Now they’re using the fact that citizens of Gaza are watching their children die of starvation, desperate for food before they die as well, to stake out aid distribution sites and then shoot them when they try to get some food. Like I said in the beginning, it almost seems like a game to them. However, that is only my opinion/observation.
Gaza death toll surpasses 55,000
Common Dreams just reported on the Gaza death toll surpassing 55,000:
With chaos and violence persisting “by design” at aid sites set up by a U.S.- and Israeli-backed organization in Gaza, the death toll at the distribution points rose Wednesday, as did the overall number of deaths in the enclave since Israel began bombarding the civilian population 20 months ago.
At least 120 Palestinians were killed in the last 24 hours across the enclave, bringing the death toll in Gaza to 55,104. Gaza’s Health Ministry added that at least 474 people have been injured over the past day.
The latest deaths include at least 57 people who were seeking humanitarian aid, which Israel is allowing to be accessed only at distribution points set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — staffed by U.S. security contractors and guarded by Israeli forces. More than 363 people were also injured at aid sites by Israeli forces since Wednesday morning.
In total, 224 people have been killed at GHF’s distribution centers since they began operating over the objections of the United Nations, aid groups that have long worked in Gaza, and an executive who had been leading the initiative but resigned late last month, saying GHF’s aid plan violated the “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.”
Issam Wahdan, a Palestinian man whose brother was killed when he tried to retrieve aid near the Netzarim Corridor this week, told Al Jazeera that he and his brother had attempted to obtain one of GHF’s food boxes several times, “but we never got lucky.”
“So, my brother and I decided to go early to the distribution center,” Wahdan told Al Jazeera. “When we arrived, we were surprised to see quadcopters shooting at us. We didn’t know what to do, we had never experienced this before. The quadcopter threw a bomb at us. There were many wounded and martyred people, including my brother, who was wounded yesterday and died today. One of our best friends was martyred on the spot.”
Wahdan suggested he and his brother saw the GHF distribution hubs as dangerous, but had to try to retrieve aid to feed their families.
“We need humanitarian aid so we have to go to the center. My brother was married and had two boys and one daughter. His youngest is 18 months old,” he said. “His children are hungry and that forced him to go there to get some aid. When your children are hungry, you need to do anything to provide them with food.”
Israel has acknowledged firing “warning shots” to control large crowds of starving Palestinians at GHF sites, and have claimed that the Israel Defense Forces have shot only at “suspects” who approached the troops. Israel and its allies have also repeatedly claimed the IDF has been targeting Hamas in Gaza, even amid mounting evidence that they have deliberately killed civilians.
Palestinians have been forced to walk an average of 9.3 miles to retrieve boxes that Chris Newton, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, said contain an amount of sustenance that is “closer to the ration given in a starvation experiment run in the 1940s in the U.S. than it is to Israel’s own previous 2008 red line for the minimum calories needed to avoid malnutrition in Gaza.”
“The violence, the chaos, and the complete inadequacy of the types and volume of aid being given out are not so much mistakes of the system, but really by design,” Newton told Al Jazeera. “This is not the system you would design if your goal was to end mass starvation in the Gaza Strip.”
The GHF sites were established more than 80 days after Israel imposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid in March, just before it broke a temporary cease-fire. In May, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification released a report warning that the siege had placed the entirety of the Gaza Strip in “Phase 4,” with the population suffering from “very high acute malnutrition and excess mortality.”
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Wednesday posted on social media the story of a 5-year-old boy named Osama, who was “once a healthy child in Gaza.”
“He now weighs only 5 kilograms, dangerously below the healthy weight for his age. Osama is being treated at Nasser Hospital but his full recovery depends on sufficient nutrition and follow-up care — both of which are at risk,” said UNICEF. “The recovery of children like Osama is possible only with a long-lasting cease-fire and aid at scale being allowed into Gaza.”
Gaza’s Government Media Office said Wednesday that Israel is “deliberately creating chaos in the Gaza Strip by perpetuating a policy of starvation and deliberately targeting and killing starving people seeking food.”
“This has been achieved,” said the office, “through direct, often intentional, and sometimes random, killings by quadcopters, helicopters, or tanks, targeting young men, elderly people, and children who rushed to obtain whatever food aid was available to feed their children and families.”
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