Deadly crush at Gaza aid site after new system implemented
Footage shows young men being rushed to the nearby Nasser hospital in the immediate aftermath of the incident on Wednesday morning.
At least 17 of the victims died from suffocation, according to one of the hospital's doctors, Dr Muhammad Saqr.
The crush is the latest in a string of incidents that have plagued the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an Israel- and US-backed organisation tasked with delivering aid in Gaza.
It comes one day after GHF implemented a new system at the site whereby red and green flags are used to tell Palestinians whether the aid centre is open, rather than posts on social media.
Analysis by Sky News shows that GHF stopped announcing the timings of aid site openings more than a week before the new system was put in place.
Of the 13 aid distributions since 6 July, only one was announced by GHF.
The flag system was implemented following widespread criticism of GHF's protocols after numerous reports of fatal mass shootings near its aid sites.
The footage below was taken on Tuesday at the site where the crush occurred, known as Secure Distribution Site 3 (SDS3). It shows a red flag above the site following an aid distribution.
"The new system doesn't tell you when to go," says Ahmed Dhair, who was present at the crush this morning. "To see the flag, you have to go very, very close to the centre."
Another person says that everyone goes early to the aid centre. "If they follow the flags, they will not have time to reach the centre."
Sky News spoke to five Palestinians who were present at the stampede. Their accounts suggest that the crush was the result of systemic failures of communication and crowd control by GHF.
Decision to approach
Father-of-four Ahmed, 36, told Sky News that "thousands" of people had been waiting nearby for the site, SDS3, to open.
Three eyewitnesses, including Ahmed, said that the crowd began to approach the aid site at around 6am after seeing the withdrawal of IDF vehicles.
Ahmed says this has become standard practice since GHF stopped announcing opening times in advance.
"This is what usually happens: we head to the site, get shot at for a while, then sleep on the ground so we don't get hit," he says. "When the [military] vehicles withdraw, we run very quickly until we get aid."
Alaa, aged 39, says that people ran towards the aid centre only to find that it was still closed. Outside the centre, he says, was a 10-metre wide passageway enclosed by barbed wire on either side.
Footage from the site, taken on Tuesday, shows this area and the barbed wire fencing around it.
"It was a small corridor for the number of people," Alaa says.
All five eyewitnesses who spoke to Sky News said that GHF employees then attempted to disperse the crowd using gunfire and either gas or pepper spray - resulting in a stampede.
"People began to push until [the Americans] opened the gates," says Alaa. "Children and some young people fell - and here was the disaster, as people trampled on them due to the pressure of the crowd."
A GHF spokesperson denied that tear gas was deployed or that shots were fired into the crowd.
"Limited use of pepper spray was deployed, only to safeguard additional loss of life," they said.
Why did people go to the aid centre?
GHF had not announced any site openings for Wednesday, raising questions over why so many people attempted to access SDS3 this morning.
GHF blamed false reports of site openings, which it said were "fuelling confusion, driving crowds to closed sites, and inciting disorder".
But witnesses said they attended because GHF has repeatedly failed to announce site openings in advance.
All six openings at SDS3 since 6 July have had no prior announcement. In one case, the site opened after GHF had announced that it would remain closed.
"If the opening time of the aid point was posted on the official page, what happened today would not have happened," said one person on the GHF's official WhatsApp channel.
Ahmed says that the GHF's social media announcements have "no credibility".
"Most of the time they say it is closed and then it is opened," he says. "They say they will open the centre at 10am, and then we are surprised that they opened it at 9am."
Another person who was present at the crush said he had turned up because the site had opened the previous day without any prior announcement.
"Please can you contact any of the security personnel and inform me of the opening time of the aid site before it opens, so that I can bring flour to my family?" one Palestinian asked Sky News.
"We are going through famine and have been without food for three days now."
Crush will add to criticism of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
Lisa Holland, Sky Correspondent in Jerusalem
The United Nations has already condemned the aid centres run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as 'death traps' – and that was before the latest loss of life in which 21 people died seemingly mostly from suffocation.
It's the first and only time we know of people dying in this way waiting to get food. Although the Gaza Health Ministry and the GHF dispute exactly what happened.
But how much longer can this Israeli and American backed way to supply aid continue when people are dying on a near daily basis?
However it happened Gaza's over-crowded hospitals are once again overwhelmed.
And there are serious questions to answer about the organisation of a system which is supposed to be providing humanitarian aid to desperately hungry people - but instead is a place where there is so much loss of life.
It leaves people with an unbearable choice between risking their lives to get supplies or going hungry.
Chaos of the system
A Palestinian former employee of GHF told Sky News that he had quit the organisation last month because of its failure to improve its systems.
"The reason I left the organisation is because they did not take into account the suggestion of doing pre-registration like other organisations so that there is a fair and honest system for the crowds," he says.
"It should be done by ID card," says Ahmed. "It is not fair for a person to be coming every day, selling the food and keep stealing again. I went almost 20 times and not once did I get a box because I can't run."
A GHF spokesperson said: "Today's incident is part of a larger pattern of Hamas trying to undermine and ultimately end GHF."
In a written statement, the Hamas-run Government Media Office denied the allegations, saying that GHF "vainly seeks to evade responsibility for one of the most heinous organised massacres committed against the starving in Gaza since the start of the genocide".
Rising number of GHF casualties
A total of 674 people have been killed while trying to collect food from GHF sites, according to the UN. These numbers do not include the latest casualties from Wednesday's incident.
Sky News analysis has found that deaths across the Gaza Strip as a whole increase significantly on days when more GHF sites are open.
"We have no more beds to put patients on - we're putting patients on the ground," says Dr Muhammad Saqr at Nasser hospital.
"We can no longer deal with any more casualties coming from GHF or other centres."
0:14
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Gaza is starving. So are its journalists
In May, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) wrote about the desperate situation facing journalists in Gaza, who were having to report while dangerously hungry. My colleagues documented the gnawing hunger, dizziness, brain fog and sickness all experienced by an exhausted Palestinian press corps already living and working in terrifying conditions. Eight weeks later, that desperate situation is now catastrophic. Several news organizations are now warning that their journalists – those documenting what is happening inside Gaza – will die unless urgent action is taken to stop Israel's deliberate refusal to allow sufficient food into the territory. 'Since AFP was founded in August 1944, we have lost journalists in conflicts, we have had wounded and prisoners in our ranks, but none of us can recall seeing a colleague die of hunger,' an association of journalists from the Agence France-Presse wrote in a statement on Monday. 'We refuse to watch them die.' Two days later, the Qatari broadcast network Al Jazeera said its journalists – like all Palestinians in Gaza– were 'fighting for their own survival' and warned: 'If we fail to act now, we risk a future where there may be no one left to tell our stories.' Al Jazeera shared a heart-wrenching post from the Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Anas Al Sharif in which he writes: 'I haven't stopped covering [the crisis] for a moment in 21 months, and today, I say it outright … And with indescribable pain. I am drowning in hunger, trembling in exhaustion, and resisting the fainting that follows me every moment … Gaza is dying. And we die with it.' Al Sharif's story is one we have heard over and over again from reporters inside Gaza. On Sunday, Sally Thabet, correspondent for Al-Kofiya satellite channel, fainted after a live broadcast on 20 July because she had not eaten all day. She told CPJ she regained consciousness in the hospital, where doctors gave her an intravenous drip for rehydration and nutrition. In an online video, she described how she and her three daughters are starving. The Palestinian journalist Shuruq As'ad, founder of the Palestine Journalism Hub, said Thabet was the third journalist to collapse on air from starvation that week. I have been a reporter for more than a quarter of a century. I know all too well that journalists have always faced risks in reporting in war zones. I have many journalist friends who bear the scars – both physical and mental – of covering such conflicts, and many whose colleagues have been killed in fighting from Libya to Syria, from Bosnia to Sierra Leone. Most take these risks knowingly. But this is not that situation. These are not the usual risks faced by reporters in conflict: a stray bullet, a landmine, ambush. This is something else. This is systematic silencing by Israel. Starvation is its latest and terrible manifestation, but we must be clear that the threats facing journalists in Gaza are not new – nor is the international community's abject failure to address them. More journalists and media workers were killed in 2024 than in any other year since CPJ began keeping records. Nearly two-thirds of all those killed in 2024 were Palestinians killed by Israel. There has been no accountability for any of these killings, despite evidence of numerous targeted attacks. Very few of these journalists chose to become war correspondents. They are war correspondents because war is their daily, inescapable reality. They report because there is no one else to do so as Israel continues to refuse access to journalists from outside Gaza to the territory, a refusal that is without precedent in the history of modern warfare. These restrictions on international access place an unbearable burden on those who are forced to remain and bear witness. CPJ has documented the deliberate targeting of journalists; their offices have been bombed, their homes destroyed. They have been forced to move repeatedly, finding shelter in flimsy tents. They struggle with frequent communications blackouts and damaged equipment. They are barred from leaving Gaza and evacuation is all but impossible, even with life-threatening and life-altering injuries. Unlike in other ongoing conflicts, such as Ukraine, which also has a high number of domestic reporters who now report on and from a war zone, Gaza's journalists have no colleagues who can replace them from elsewhere, who can provide them with much-needed rest and respite. Now these journalists are starving to death before our eyes. The international community has the information it needs to act to reverse this course. We know what is happening in Gaza. We know because of the journalists who have documented the attacks at aid stations, who have filmed the starving children and the bombed hospitals, and who are now recording their own demise. There is an adage in journalism circles that explains reporters' reluctance to write about themselves: No journalist wants to become the story. If we do not act now, there will be no one left in Gaza to tell anyone's story. And that silence – those deaths – will be on us. Jodie Ginsberg is CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists
Times
an hour ago
- Times
‘This is famine': children starve as Gaza aid can only trickle in
For months the warnings of famine in Gaza came and went. In the war's morass of claim and counter-claim, it was hard to tell when occasional hunger became intense. In the last week, though, graphic images made the onset of starvation impossible to ignore. In one, the emaciated corpse of 12-year-old Abdeljawad al-Ghalban, little more than a collection of stick-like bones, lay on a mortuary trolley. He had suffered from cerebral palsy, and his family had been unable to get hold of the specialist treatment he needed. 'He needed a specific kind of milk and food,' his father, Abdelhamid, said. 'He was already sick, but the malnutrition made his condition worse.' Not all the children affected by hunger were sick before. Two-year-old Yazan Abu Foul is clearly wasting away. 'Yazan doesn't suffer from any diseases,' his father, Mahmoud, said on Friday. 'His condition is purely from hunger. Over the past months, I noticed his weight dropping more and more. I took him to several doctors. They all told me the same thing: this is famine.' The United Nations says it is finding it particularly difficult to supply specialist foodstuffs needed for sick and already malnourished children. But it says the general situation has been worsening rapidly for all of Gaza's 2.1 million residents for months, since Israel imposed an aid blockade in March. That was lifted in May, and a new organisation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-backed startup, was brought in to be the leading aid provider. But neither it nor the UN agencies have managed to restore aid deliveries to their former level and, with much of the Gaza strip levelled by the war, the population is dependent on that aid. 'As the Israeli government's siege starves the people of Gaza, aid workers are now joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families,' a joint statement by 100 aid agencies including Christian Aid, Médecins Sans Frontieres and Mercy Corps said on Wednesday. 'With supplies now totally depleted, humanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.' Israel strongly rejects the accusation that it is responsible, accusing Hamas of looting aid and saying the UN warehouses are full of supplies if only they would deliver it. 'It is time for them to pick it up and stop blaming Israel for the bottlenecks which are occurring,' David Mercer, the Israeli government spokesman, said in reply. While aid supplies have varied during the war, and the situation improved immensely during the ceasefire earlier this year, delivery has become increasingly difficult since the blockade. • 'Mass starvation' across Gaza as US envoy opens ceasefire talks UN agencies say that disinformation and lack of ability to monitor a violent and changing situation exacerbate confusion over how much aid is getting in. International journalists are unable to report first-hand as they are banned by the Israeli authorities from entering Gaza. The agencies say the fact that their warehouses are full is exactly the point they are making. The obstacle is getting it through an Israeli-controlled war zone to the people who need it. They deny that Hamas is responsible for taking aid, although there are certainly cases of local gangsters trying to loot it. The main problems, the agencies say, are the delays caused by the Israeli inspection process and that convoys are mobbed the minute they hit the road — an inevitable consequence of the desperation among the population. 'We have always been flagging that we have no systematic diversion by Hamas,' Antoine Renard, head of World Food Programme (WFP) operations in Gaza, said. He drew attention to the delays affecting a WFP convoy on Sunday. He said it took 20 hours for 19 lorries to arrive at the warehouse on the Gaza side of the border crossing, load up, and begin delivery. The Israeli military took more than eight hours to inspect the lorries, a regular part of the process, though nothing untoward was found. Another six to seven hours was spent waiting for Israeli approvals to travel. The UN estimates that between 500 and 600 lorries a day are needed to supply enough food for all Gaza's residents. • Who are the US military contractors delivering aid to starving Gazans? The issue is not just with such delays. Both UN and GHF distributors face chaotic and dangerous supply routes, which are regularly overwhelmed by the people trying to reach distribution points. WFP lorries are mobbed the minute they hit the road, which is often little more than a smashed-up track. Convoys have to take routes determined in advance by the Israeli military, and which residents are well aware of. When reaching GHF distribution points, residents are told to queue on specific routes, and those who stray risk being shot by Israeli forces who are still conducting military operations throughout the strip and guarding the aid sites. In part, this is a result of the blockade in March and the shift of aid distribution by Israel away from the UN towards primarily the GHF. The UN system focuses on distributing aid to kitchens and bakeries run by aid agencies. But when aid stopped getting into Gaza, that system collapsed. The few kitchens and bakeries that remain cannot find fuel and are often burning waste for their ovens instead. Much aid is now distributed directly to families instead. This means every aid distribution operation becomes a steeplechase among the desperate, as the fittest compete to evade shooting, race to the aid points and grapple with each other for such food parcels as arrive. In this Darwinian process, the sick, the elderly, and lone women with children to care for are left behind. The GHF defends its provision of aid, and after a difficult start it has indeed handed out tens of millions of food packages. But unlike the UN, which provides large boxes of raw ingredients — flour, pasta, lentils and tomato paste — designed to feed a family for a month, the GHF distributes meals that it says will keep a family of five going for three or four days. Then the family's young men, if they have them, have to go risk their lives going back for more aid. Renaud described an environment where, when aid deliveries resumed in May, the chaos had reached a tipping point. Beforehand, however poor conditions were, residents believed that the agencies would be able to supply food eventually. Now, that belief has gone, a vicious circle in which the harder it is to deliver food, the more desperate people storm the routes and the convoys, making the process even harder. • Starvation and despair in Gaza: 'Aid is just another injustice' Things can change, and may have already started to do so as this week's grim photographs started to emerge. Israeli inspections have eased in recent days. By Wednesday 150 UN lorries were able to get through, 93 for the World Food Programme alone — a sign of what is possible, though nowhere near enough. Food supplied by agencies does sometimes end up on the local market, and the prices tell a story. During the ceasefire, a one-kilo bag of flour cost $1.50. That went up to $100 by last weekend. By the end of the week it was down to $15-20. The question remains whether this marginal improvement will save Yazan and other children. Scores have died already this month. As he treated Sila Barbakh, an 11-month-old girl who weighs just seven and a half pounds, Dr Ahmed Al-Farra, a paediatrician, said she was basically healthy. 'This is primary malnutrition,' he said. 'She has lost subcutaneous tissue, lost muscle mass. She needs vitamins. She needs supplementation. But if she gets good nutrition, she will survive.'
BBC News
2 hours ago
- BBC News
Almost a third of people in Gaza 'not eating for days,' UN warns
Almost one in three people in Gaza are going days without eating, the UN's food aid programme has warned."Malnutrition is surging with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment," the World Food Programme (WFP) said in a statement to news agency of starvation in Gaza have intensified this week. Nine more people died of malnutrition on Friday, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry - bringing the total such deaths since the war began to which controls the entry of all supplies into Gaza, says there is no restriction on aid getting into the territory and blames Hamas for any malnutrition. An Israeli security official said on Friday that airdrops of aid into Gaza could be allowed in the coming days - something aid agencies have previously cautioned is an inefficient way to get supplies into local media reported the United Arab Emirates and Jordan would carry out the latest drops, a senior Jordanian official told the BBC that its military was yet to receive permission from Israel to do UN has described the move as a "distraction to inaction" by the Israeli move came amid mounting international concern about humanitarian conditions in Friday, Germany, France and the UK called on Israel to "immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid" into the a joint statement, they called for an immediate end to the "humanitarian catastrophe that we are witnessing in Gaza," and to the war itself, adding that Israel must "uphold its obligations under international humanitarian law"."Withholding essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable," read the Friday, the UN secretary-general accused the international community for "inaction" in its response to the suffering of Palestinians in the Guterres said he could not "explain the level of indifference and inaction we see by too many in the international community - the lack of compassion, the lack of truth, the lack of humanity".Addressing the Amnesty International global assembly, he said more than 1,000 Palestinians had been killed while trying to access food since 27 May, according to UN records - when the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began distributing supplies as an alternative to the UN-led agencies. A US security contractor who worked for the GHF in May and June 2025 told the BBC on Friday that he had "without question… witnessed war crimes" during that Aguilar said he saw the IDF and US contractors using live ammunition, artillery, mortar rounds, and tank fire on civilians at food distribution retired soldier said: "In my entire career, I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population until I was in Gaza at the hands of the IDF and US contractors."In its response, the GHF said the claims - which came from "a disgruntled former contractor who was terminated for misconduct a month ago" - were "categorically false". Meanwhile, the future of talks to secure a new ceasefire and hostage-release deal remains uncertain, after the US and Israel withdrew their negotiating teams from President Donald Trump said Hamas "didn't really want to make a deal"."I think they want to die," he has expressed surprise about the US remarks. A senior Hamas official also told the BBC's Gaza correspondent that mediators had informed the group negotiations had not collapsed, and said the Israeli delegation was expected to return to Doha next week. Israel launched a war in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken than 59,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-run health imposed a total blockade of aid deliveries at the start of March and resumed its military offensive against Hamas two weeks later, collapsing a two-month ceasefire. It said it wanted to put pressure on the group to release its remaining Israeli the blockade was partially eased after almost two months amid warnings of a looming famine from global experts, the shortages of food, medicine and fuel have of Gaza's population has been displaced multiple times and more than 90% of homes are estimated to be damaged or destroyed.
