Draft:The Flour Massacre

At least 112 Palestinians have been killed and more than 750 wounded after Israeli troops opened fire on hundreds waiting for food aid southwest of Gaza City.

Here is what we know:

What happened and when?
The incident unfolded at about 04:30 local time (02:30 GMT) on Thursday, when people congregated at Harun al-Rashid Street in Gaza, where aid trucks carrying flour were believed to be on the way.

A convoy of aid trucks passed through the checkpoint, heading north, as people started gathering in large groups. According to the Israeli military, a convoy of 31 trucks entered Gaza but nearly 20 entered the north on Monday and Tuesday.

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.

Where did the shooting take place?
Palestinian authorities said the incident took place on al-Rashid Street at the Nabulsi Roundabout on the southwestern side of Gaza City.

This is in northern Gaza, where food deliveries have been scarce. The first deliveries in over a month arrived this week.

This happened one day after Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP), told the United Nations Security Council more than 500,000, or one in four people, were at risk of famine, with one in every six children below the age of two considered acutely malnourished.

How do Palestinian witnesses describe what happened?
Palestinians in Gaza said that Israeli forces conducted a massacre by firing on a crowd of people who were waiting to collect desperately needed food aid.

According to Al Jazeera’s 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.

“We were going to bring flour … then Israeli snipers shot at us,” another person in the area told Al Jazeera. “They shot me in the leg. I’m unable to stand up,” he added.

What did Israel say?
The Israeli military said the trucks were managed by private contractors as part of an aid operation overseen by them for the past four nights.

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.

Witnesses insisted that the stampede happened only after Israeli troops started firing at people looking for food.

What is the current situation with aid in Gaza?
Since the war started, aid agencies claim that Israel has been delaying deliveries. Israel denies the allegation.

“The risk of famine is being fuelled by the inability to bring critical food supplies into Gaza in sufficient quantities, and the almost impossible operating conditions faced by our staff on the ground,” Skau said.

He described dangerous conditions for WFP trucks trying to get food to the north earlier this month. “There were delays at checkpoints; they faced gunfire and other violence; food was looted along the way; and at their destination, they were overwhelmed by desperately hungry people,” he added.

A month ago, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague said Israel must do everything to prevent genocidal acts in the territory.

But according to human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Israel “failed to take even the bare minimum steps to comply”.

The number of trucks decreased by 40 percent since the ICJ ruling, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).