Israeli attacks on aid convoy escorts in Gaza jeopardize food distribution – Technologist

On a mission to find food, inhabitants from the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip had to turn back on Wednesday, March 20. “Aid distributions have been canceled due to the impossibility of ensuring security and after martyrs fell,” read a poster posted on the gate of a school, which served as a food distribution point.

The previous day, several dozen volunteers and government officials had gathered on Salah al-Din Road, one of the two main arteries running through the Palestinian territory, to secure and escort a convoy of humanitarian aid, using the route to head towards Jabaliya and the northern Gaza Strip. The group, members of “popular protection committees” organized by an “assembly of northern families and clans” – which brings together notables and heads of the territory’s major families – had last week managed to escort two 18-truck convoys to the area with the help of local police.

In the early evening, as they waited for new vehicles to pass through the Kuwait roundabout, the gateway to Gaza City, they were targeted by an air raid that killed 23 people. Among the dead were Amjad Hathat, director of the crisis unit in the east of the city, and Mahdi Abdel, a mathematics teacher who had volunteered to coordinate the committees set up to protect the convoys. In the Jabaliya camp, it was the warehouse of UNRWA, the main UN agency in Gaza, that was targeted on Wednesday. Following the bombings, the assembly of family and clans condemned “a deliberate attack, aimed at installing a state of chaos in Gaza and the North, and preventing the distribution of food to the people who need it most, today.”

‘Terrorist activities’

The evening of March 14 turned into a bloodbath when several hundred Gazans gathered to wait for trucks to pass through the Kuwait roundabout. More than 20 residents were killed by Israeli fire, according to local authorities. On February 29, a similar carnage, in what was dubbed the “flour massacre,” claimed the lives of over a hundred people. Committees were set up to prevent another tragedy, but as they were created with Hamas’s consent, they now seem to be paying for this affiliation.

On Tuesday, an Israeli strike targeted the home of community leader Ismail al-Nono in the Salah al-Din area, killing him, his wife and several relatives. On Wednesday, Jamal Al-Kahlot, head of the tribal committee in the northern regions of the Gaza Strip, who was cooperating with the police to distribute aid, died in similar circumstances, according to the Geneva-based human rights organization Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

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