More than 100 Palestinians were killed in Gaza City on Thursday as Israeli troops opened fire on people trying to get food from humanitarian aid trucks, but accounts of the attack remained at odds.
Gaza hospital officials initially reported an Israeli strike on the crowd at the al-Nabusi roundabout in the western part of the city. Witnesses later said Israeli troops opened fire as people pulled flour and canned goods off trucks.
Israeli officials acknowledged that troops opened fire, saying they did so because they thought the people rushing toward the aid trucks “posed a threat.”
The military had at first said that “dozens were killed and injured from pushing, trampling and being run over by the trucks.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office offered a similar explanation, saying many of the dead were crushed by the trucks after “aid trucks were overwhelmed by people trying to loot.”
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said with Thursday’s incident, the death toll now tops 30,000 in the nearly five-month Israeli war against Hamas militants that started October 7 with a shock Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people.
