Twenty one people have been killed following a crush at an aid distribution site in Gaza, according to local health officials.
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.”
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.”
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Additional reporting by Adam Parker, OSINT editor.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
