Chaos deepens in Gaza as more than 100 killed in aid stampede, different statements surface

It’s past 8:00 am in the besieged Gaza Strip and Israel – and among some of the main developments overnight is certainly the devastating aid stampede in the enclave that has claimed at least 112 Palestinian lives and injured about 760 others.

The US has blocked a statement at the UN Security Council that could have assigned blame to Israel for the attack on Palestinians awaiting food relief. Giving the figure of 112 dead, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry accused Israel of a “massacre”.

Incident could complicate efforts to broker a ceasefire

The BBC reported that crowds on Thursday descended on a convoy of lorries. Israel’s military say tanks fired warning shots but did not strike the convoy. But some Palestinians have accused troops of firing directly at them.

A Palestinian witness told the media agency that most of the people who lost their lives in the incident had been run over as lorry drivers tried to move forward. Israeli aerial footage shows hundreds of people on and around lorries.

France has described “fire by Israeli soldiers against civilians trying to access food” as “unjustifiable” and US President Joe Biden has expressed concerns over the incident complicating efforts to broker a temporary ceasefire ahead of Ramadan.

The incident came hours after the Health Ministry in Gaza announced that over 30,000 people had been killed in the Palestinian territory since the beginning of the conflict. Some 7,000 are missing and 70,450 are injured. Gazans are also at risk of a looming famine.

Palestinian prisoners a key condition of any ceasefire deal

The ongoing crisis erupted on October 7 as Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 253 hostages. The Israeli retaliatory strikes, on the other hand, have claimed tens of thousands of lives so far and displaced many others.

As mediators try to broker a temporary truce in the fighting, one of the key sticking points has been the number of Palestinian prisoners to be released in exchange for Israeli hostages – of which about 130 are still being held, as per The Conversation.