Macron calls for a cease-fire after scores die in
rush for food in Gaza.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/01/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
The deaths
of scores of Palestinians in a desperate rush for food aid in northern Gaza on
Thursday was met with mounting international calls for a cease-fire and for
Israel to take immediate measures to increase the flow of supplies into the
territory.
The
sequence of events leading up to the mass casualties, when local authorities
said more than 100 people had died after Israeli soldiers opened fire at a
crowd of thousands amassed near a convoy of aid trucks, remained unclear.
Officials in Gaza and the Israeli military offered diverging accounts.
International
leaders and aid groups said the disaster reinforced the need for an immediate
halt in fighting to alleviate the human suffering that has no parallel in
recent memory.
President
Emmanuel Macron of France expressed on Friday “deep indignation” at the images
emerging from the scene and called for an immediate cease-fire, saying,
“Civilians have been targeted by Israeli soldiers.”
“I express
my strongest condemnation of these shootings and call for truth, justice, and
respect for international law,” he wrote on the social media site X.
The Gazan
health ministry said Israeli forces had carried out a “massacre,” injuring 700
in addition to those killed. A spokesman for the Israeli military said that
soldiers had fired warning shots into the air before opening fire “when the mob
moved in a manner which endangered them.” The military said most of the deaths
had been caused by a stampede and that people had also been run over by the aid
trucks.
Videos of
the predawn incident show people crawling and ducking for cover, and a hospital
in Gaza City said it had received bodies of at least a dozen people with
gunshot wounds and treated more than 100 people with gunshot wounds.
Samantha
Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International
Development, a government agency, said that regardless of how they had died, it
was clear that civilians were killed or injured while trying to get food for
their families.
“That
cannot happen,” she said. “Desperate civilians trying to feed their starving
families should not be shot at.”
She urged
Israel to open more border crossings to facilitate aid reaching northern Gaza
and to ease customs restrictions that she said leave flour sitting in ports
while people near starvation.
The aid
group Doctors Without Borders said it hadn’t been able to reach its physicians
and other staff working in northern Gaza because of unreliable communications
but that irrespective of the details, the Israeli military was accountable.
“This
situation is the direct result of the string of unconscionable decisions taken
by Israeli authorities while waging this war,” the group’s president, Isabelle
Defourny, said in a statement.
— Victoria Kim
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