Israeli soldiers opened fire near a food distribution site in southern Gaza on Saturday morning, according to survivors and the Israeli military, in a series of incidents that the Gazan health authorities said had collectively killed at least 32 people.
The bloodshed was the latest violence connected to a new and deeply contentious food distribution system in Gaza that was introduced by Israel nearly two months ago. The United Nations said this past week that more than 670 Palestinians had been killed in similar episodes near sites built under the new system.
“This has become my terrifying daily routine,” said Luay Abu Oda, 24, who described in an interview how he had survived the violence on Saturday. “I dropped to the ground and pretended to be dead just to survive. I couldn’t even reach for my phone to check the time.”
The Israeli military said in a statement that its troops, positioned about 1,000 yards from a food site in Rafah, southern Gaza, had fired “warning shots” on Saturday morning after people approached them and did not comply with an order to halt. The site had not yet opened for the day, the statement added.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private Israel-backed group that manages the new system and oversees the site closest to the violence on Saturday, said that there were “no incidents at or near any of our aid distribution sites today.” But it acknowledged that some deadly Israeli military activity had “occurred hours before our sites opened,” most of it “several kilometers away from the nearest G.H.F. site.”
Though the foundation has told civilians to avoid the sites before they open, many often head there early, sometimes walking for hours to reach the aid points, because food is so scarce in Gaza and the handouts often run out quickly.
Israeli soldiers have in recent months repeatedly shot at crowds of Palestinians making that journey, seemingly as a crude and lethal form of crowd control. Survivors of Saturday’s incident described a similar pattern.
Mr. Abu Oda, 24, said that he had walked for miles to get close to the front of the line before the site opened on Saturday. After he joined large numbers of civilians several hundred yards from the entrance, the crowd lurched chaotically toward it, prompting soldiers to fire without warning, he said.
“Someone screamed, ‘It’s open now!’ and the crowd surged forward,” Mr. Abu Oda said in an interview near the hospital where the wounded were taken. “I was near the front when gunfire broke out,” he added. “One man ahead of me and two beside me were shot.”
Later, Mr. Abu Oda said, he helped to load wounded people into two tuk-tuks, or three-wheeled taxis.
“The injured were packed like fish in a box — bleeding, screaming, stacked on top of each other,” he said.
Another survivor, Mohammed al-Hato, said he had been shot in a separate incident, about two miles away, after he had joined a fast-moving crowd of people trying to reach the site via an access road. As the crowd ran down the road, soldiers nearby suddenly opened fire, he said.
“I ran like everyone else, and then, halfway down the road, the shooting started,” Mr. al-Hato, 33, said in an interview in the hospital. “I saw people dropping around me.”
After Mr. al-Hato tried to flee, he was shot in his right leg, he said.
“I’m still here at the hospital since 8 a.m., waiting for a bone specialist,” Mr. al-Hato said. “All I wanted was a sack of flour.”
Such deadly incidents have become common since late May, when Israel allowed the foundation to distribute food to Palestinians from a handful of sites in areas under Israeli control.
For now, the system has largely replaced one run by the United Nations, which previously distributed food from hundreds of points, mainly in areas controlled by Hamas.
The foundation says it is happy to work with the United Nations, but U.N. officials say Israeli restrictions make it hard to operate.
Israel says the new system is necessary to prevent Hamas from stealing, stockpiling and selling the food at high prices to civilians. Aid groups say it has turned the process of seeking food into a near-daily death trap because it brings crowds of desperate and hungry civilians into regular proximity with Israeli troops.
Israeli officials have acknowledged that troops have fired on crowds approaching the aid sites, but suggested that the death tolls have been inflated. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has said that violence rarely occurs at the sites themselves and has accused Hamas of encouraging the unrest and attacking Palestinians employed at the sites.
More generally, aid groups say that the new system has yet to prevent widespread hunger, which surged in Gaza after Israel’s 80-day blockade on all food and fuel from March to May.
This past week, one of the main United Nations agencies in Gaza, UNRWA, said that it screened about 10,600 children in the second half of June and found that around 900, or nearly one in 10, was suffering from malnourishment.
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.
Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
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