Palestinians seeking aid ‘walking into military base, not humanitarian site’
Operations at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation started on Tuesday … [but] today there was no aid distribution going on. From the early hours of this morning, a lot of people showed up at the [three] sites where food was supposed to be distributed.
People were told there was not going to be food distribution [and] they were shot at by the Israeli military. They were chased by the quadcopters. As many as 20 people were reported with various injuries.
People are telling us that the sites that are managed and operated by the GHF are metres away from where the Israeli military is stationed. They can see the tanks, they can see the armoured vehicles. The armoured surveillance [is] around the clock, as they were waiting to get to the tables where the food parcels are available.
They say, “We are walking into a military base, not a humanitarian site”.
There are also reports of enforced disappearances. A lot of families reported that many of their children, many of their family members, who went to the sites … have gone missing as they were trying to get food.
It’s a combination of desperation, hunger and now the enforced disappearances – coupled with the ongoing shooting by the Israeli military.
UN envoy slams Israel’s ‘brutal humanitarian camouflage’
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, has accused Israel of deliberately misusing humanitarian language to facilitate “the commission of atrocity crimes in Gaza”.
“Israel pretends to promote humanitarian solutions in order to continue its control of Gaza and sustain its systematic denial of life-saving humanitarian aid to the starving population in the besieged strip,” Albanese said in a statement.
“It is a deliberate strategy – aimed at masking atrocities, displacing the displaced, bombing the bombarded, burning Palestinians alive and maiming survivors,” she said.
“All camouflaged behind the language of aid, to divert international attention from legal accountability, in Israel’s attempt to dismantle the very principles upon which humanitarian law was built.”
