The Al-Rashid Incident: Tragic Accident or Deliberate Massacre in Gaza?

It was the sort of incident that demanded headlines on every news site, every television channel, and every global-affairs podcast around the world. But it was also the sort of incident where every one of those headlines said something just a little bit different. In the early hours of February 29, 2024, something happened in the northern reaches of the Gaza Strip, just to the west of Gaza City itself. On a city road called Al-Rashid Street, a convoy of humanitarian aid trucks was approaching its destination, where thousands of Gazans waited to receive desperately needed food aid amid widespread food insecurity and a growing risk of starvation across the territory.

That is where the consensus falls apart. In its place comes confusion, hazy details, conflicting accounts, and very forceful claims about precisely what happened on Al-Rashid Street. According to some accounts, the incident was a crowd stampede, one in which far too many Gazans died in the crush, while a few others were shot by Israeli troops attempting to protect the convoy.

According to others, it was a massacre — planned, deliberate, and carried out by Israeli troops against Palestinian civilians with complete impunity. According to still others, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, though with endless disagreement over exactly which point in that middle ground is the correct one.

Key Takeaways

On February 29, 2024, an aid convoy on Al-Rashid Street in northern Gaza became the site of a mass-casualty event in which Gaza health officials counted at least 112 dead and over 760 injured, with later estimates exceeding a thousand total casualties.
The IDF’s preliminary review attributes most deaths to a stampede and to people being run over by aid trucks, claiming Israeli fire was limited to individuals who posed a direct threat after the main incident.
Eyewitnesses, survivors, and doctors describe a fundamentally different event: gunfire directed at a largely docile crowd, casualties with gunshot and shrapnel wounds to the head and chest, and allegations of fire from tanks, drones, and naval forces.
The convoy carried aid donated by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, entering Gaza from the south and moving north along the coast through a secured corridor before reaching the al-Nabulsi roundabout.
The collapse of Hamas civilian police, who once escorted convoys, left a security vacuum that aid agencies say made looting and violence around deliveries nearly inevitable.
The international response split sharply: Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, and China condemned Israel, while the United States blocked a UN Security Council statement and instead authorized symbolic food airdrops.
The incident intensified the global push for a ceasefire as Ramadan approached and as roughly 300,000 people in northern Gaza faced a deepening starvation crisis.

WarFronts has worked to sift through the confusion, the horror, and the bitter animosity on all sides, and to gain what clarity is possible on the Al-Rashid incident: what exactly happened, who is to blame, what the world intends to do about it, and what it means for the prospect of peace in a war that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The thesis is uncomfortable but unavoidable: in conditions of mass starvation, asymmetric warfare, and a collapsed civilian order, the deaths on Al-Rashid Street were the predictable product of a system primed for catastrophe — and assigning definitive blame may remain impossible for a very long time.

The Conditions That Made It Possible

Before the events of February 29 can be understood, the conditions that produced them must be. The Gaza Strip is among the most brutal war zones on the planet today. It is a territory under the internationally recognized authority of Israel, but it is primarily settled by an Arab Palestinian population of about two and a half million people.

It has been functionally encircled by Israel and its diplomatic partner, Egypt, since Israel withdrew its military forces from Gaza in 2005. The relationship between Israel and its Palestinian population in Gaza has drawn international controversy and condemnation for decades — a relationship that devolved into the current war on October 7, 2023.

October 7 saw a brutal attack by the Gaza-based militant terror organization known as Hamas, one that killed upward of one thousand Israeli civilians and soldiers and saw Hamas fighters take hundreds of hostages back into the Gaza Strip. The subsequent Israeli counteroffensive, billed as an operation to rescue hostages, dismantle Hamas, and restore order in Gaza, has drawn increasing condemnation as tens of thousands of Gazans — including high numbers of civilians and even children — have been killed in the violence. The offensive has displaced the vast majority of Gazans from their pre-war homes. Most are now clustered into southern sections of the Strip, but some have remained in the north, where Israel has claimed success in rooting out most of the Hamas organization’s fighters and infrastructure.

The most pressing problem among a great many is mounting food insecurity that has pushed much of Gaza’s population to the brink of starvation. Israel’s wartime blockade has seen humanitarian aid nearly entirely shut out, in a territory that lacks either the agricultural capacity or the land development to support anywhere near the food demands of its population.

A Population on the Edge of Famine

The numbers tell the story of a deficit that is widening by the day. Across February 2024, UNRWA — the UN agency that manages work with Palestinian refugees — reported that an average of ninety-seven aid trucks per day entered Gaza. That sounds substantial until the contents of those trucks have to be spread among a population of more than two million. In reality, ninety-seven trucks is less than a fifth of the daily arrivals believed necessary to keep the Gazan population alive, and the consequences of that shortfall are becoming more visible all the time.

The warnings from inside the UN system were stark. As United Nations aid official Ramesh Rajasingham told the UN Security Council on Tuesday, February 27, roughly one-fourth of the Gazan population is currently “one step away from famine.” Against that backdrop, the news that a large food convoy would be coming to northern Gaza — the part of the Strip where hunger and food shortages are most severe, and where no similar deliveries had happened in more than a month — was understandably enormous news for the Palestinians still living there.

Those Palestinians were living in a part of northern Gaza that has seen some of the most brutal and well-reported violence of the conflict. The location where the Al-Rashid incident took place sits just about three kilometers from al-Shifa Hospital. It was at al-Shifa that Israel made global headlines with a military incursion in November 2023, alleging the hospital was being used as a Hamas headquarters and seizing it despite the presence of thousands of wounded people and refugees. In the months since, this part of Gaza has become an increasingly desperate place for those who tried to remain rather than flee southward.

When the February 29 aid convoy arrived, it represented far more than a meal. It was a desperately needed lifeline.

The Convoy and the al-Nabulsi Roundabout

The convoy was moving northward on Al-Rashid Street before dawn, at approximately 4:30 in the morning, carrying aid that — according to an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson — had been donated by other nations including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The convoy had entered Gaza at the territory’s southern border with Israel and traveled north along the coast in a secured humanitarian corridor. IDF troops in military vehicles escorted the convoy, while other IDF equipment, including tanks, was positioned close to the route the convoy was expected to follow.

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It is unclear whether any stops were planned. Before reaching its intended destination in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, the convoy does not appear to have been scheduled to halt where it did. But the desperation among local residents was profound. Eyewitness accounts indicate that at least some people living near the convoy’s intended route began gathering the previous night, hoping to convince the convoy operators or the IDF to hand out supplies on the spot.

By the best available reconstruction, there was not so much one single crowd gathered at one point as there were a great many people spread up and down Al-Rashid Street — generally in the vicinity of one particular roundabout called al-Nabulsi. That roundabout sits along the convoy route just past a nearby IDF checkpoint, which would have been the last on the convoy’s journey. It was here, at this junction of a starving population and a heavily armed military escort, that accounts of what happened begin to diverge.

Two Versions: The IDF Account

The IDF has published a preliminary review of the incident, and Israel’s presentation of events deserves to be examined first. According to the IDF, the crowd in and around the al-Nabulsi roundabout rushed the aid trucks as they passed. Israeli soldiers fired warning shots from small arms and tanks to deter what military spokesman and Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari described as a stampede. That stampede, the IDF says, is where a majority of the Palestinians who died in the incident actually died — some crushed by the crowd or trampled after falling, and others run over by aid trucks.

The IDF does admit that Israeli troops took some lives, but maintains that the only Palestinians fired upon were people who appeared to pose a direct threat after the main stampede had concluded and after the convoy had moved out of the area. In a press briefing on March 3, Hagari said: “Following the warning shots fired to disperse the stampede and after our forces had started retreating, several looters approached our forces and posed an immediate threat to them. According to the initial review, the soldiers responded toward several individuals.”

Drone footage released by the IDF indicates at least two separate events during the incident, at two points roughly half a kilometer apart. Annotated screenshot images released by the military highlight what appear to be people lying motionless on and around Al-Rashid Street, with Israeli military vehicles nearby. A significant caveat applies: the IDF’s video of the incident is heavily edited and was presented only in short clips, a fact that has done little to settle the dispute and a great deal to inflame it.

Two Versions: The Account From the Scene

Accounts from the scene present a very different version of events. The many eyewitness reports relate to a range of individual experiences at various moments throughout the tragedy, but a general sequence emerges. Non-IDF reports indicate that the crowd around Al-Rashid Street was mostly docile before the IDF began firing gunshots, including tracer ammunition. Those gunshots, witnesses say, were not warnings; they were fired toward people in the crowd.

Some accounts say this happened before any Gazans had reached the stopped aid trucks; others say people were fired on while removing food from the trucks.

One journalist at the scene, Mahmoud Awadeyah, said: “Israelis purposefully fired at the men… they were trying to get near the aid trucks that had the flour. They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.” A panic and a stampede followed.

During it, by these accounts, IDF troops continued to fire and kill local Gazans, and in the confusion aid trucks struck some of the casualties while trying to flee the scene and escape the troops’ line of fire. Another journalist, Ismail al-Ghoul, reporting for Al Jazeera, claimed that “Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies.”

Even those allegations are the less damning ones. Some survivors claim the IDF’s actions were far more nefarious, describing snipers firing on the crowd and the military opening fire not only with infantry but from armored vehicles, tanks, attack drones, and even naval forces on the nearby Mediterranean Sea. By these accounts, what happened on the convoy route was no accident at all. It was a massacre.

The Death Toll and the Medical Evidence

Whether accidental or deliberate, the carnage at Al-Rashid was devastating to the Gazans who had gathered to meet the convoy. Preliminary death-toll estimates were released by Gazan health officials, who are employed by the territory’s Hamas-run government but who typically issue casualty counts that are subsequently substantiated by international aid organizations. According to Gaza, at least 112 people were killed and more than 760 injured. Further estimates revised the total upward to over a thousand casualties, counting both the dead and the wounded.

Muatasem Salah, part of the Gaza Ministry of Health’s Emergency Committee, told Reuters: “Any attempt to claim that people were martyred due to overcrowding or being run over is incorrect. The wounded and the martyrs are the result of being shot with heavy-calibre bullets.” On the ground, local and international medics said they could not keep up with the flood of injured streaming into hospitals. One high-ranking UN official who visited al-Shifa twice afterward said: “There were a lot of heavy injuries, there were many, many surgeries.

One surgeon told me he had to do 18 surgeries just in the first night.” That official also reported personally seeing several people wounded by bullets rather than by trampling or crush injuries.

An emergency-room doctor at al-Shifa named Mohamed Eghrab described the pattern of wounds: “Most of these injuries were the result of gunshots, injuries as a result of explosions of artillery shells and tank shells. Most of the injuries were in the upper part of the body, in the head, the chest, and in the abdominal area. The majority of the injuries were severe injuries.

Roughly about 70% of the injuries needed surgeries.” Eghrab added that because al-Shifa currently has only two functioning operating rooms, no oxygen supplies, and very limited medications, many of the wounded were expected to die before they would ever reach an operating table. A doctor named Yehia al Masri, who witnessed the event directly, said he saw dozens of people dead or injured by gunshot in addition to those crushed or trampled.

Two other nearby hospitals, Kamal Adwan and al-Awda, said that all or most of the people they treated had been wounded by bullets or shrapnel.

Israel’s Statements and the Drone Footage Problem

The Gaza Ministry of Health labeled the incident a massacre, and Hamas military representatives accused the IDF of firing directly at civilians’ heads with intent to kill. In the hours immediately afterward, the ministry announced that Gaza’s total death toll since the start of the Israel-Hamas war had crested over thirty thousand, including 21,000 women and children, alongside seven thousand missing and seventy thousand injured. It remains unknown whether the Al-Rashid deaths pushed those figures past their most recent benchmarks, though many if not all were likely already counted.

Hamas tied the incident quickly to the ongoing ceasefire negotiations. Spokesperson Izzat al-Rishq said: “The negotiations are not open-ended and we won’t allow it to be used as cover for crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza.”

Israel rejected the Gazan death toll out of hand, but it has not yet offered its own estimate of how many people were killed or what proportion died from Israeli gunfire. Nor has it reconciled earlier government claims with its later report. One IDF official told reporters shortly after the incident, as quoted by Axios, that Israeli soldiers had fired on “dozens of Palestinian civilians who approached the IDF and got within tens of meters,” stating that troops had fired at the legs of nearby civilians, hitting about ten people.

Hagari, the spokesman, reiterated that the bulk of the deaths were not attributable to the IDF, saying of the Palestinians involved: “Some began violently pushing and even trampling other Gazans to death, looting the humanitarian supplies. The unfortunate incident resulted in dozens of Gazans killed and injured.” He described Israel’s actions as a “limited response.”

Those statements fell short of what much of the international community had hoped to see. The drone footage Israel published has not backed up its claims in the way the IDF might have wished. It depicts many people fleeing the vicinity of the aid trucks, including some who appear to take cover behind walls, but it is spliced together from multiple clips and omits whatever happened immediately before people are seen running away. As WarFronts notes, if there were one surefire way to convince skeptics of the Israeli government that the IDF wanted to conceal something, splicing footage while omitting critical sections would probably be it.

The Collapse of Order Around the Aid Line

The incident also revived hard questions about the new status quo on aid deliveries in Gaza, where local actors who once helped keep order are now absent from the process. Until recently, convoys were escorted by civilian police from Hamas, who had generally been able to avoid this sort of violence — and certainly anything on this scale. But those civilian police walked off the job earlier in February, leaving a vacuum.

Desperate Palestinians began attacking convoys, and the only people now guarding deliveries are simultaneously on the opposite side of a war. The reason the Hamas police quit is itself telling: they had been increasingly targeted by Israel.

Recent convoys have borne the brunt of this breakdown. The World Food Program suspended aid deliveries after a recent convoy — the worst in three weeks — was surrounded by hungry Gazans at an IDF checkpoint and then fired on in Gaza City. The WFP tried again, only to have its 14-truck convoy turned away at an Israeli checkpoint and then looted. In the aftermath of February 29, Jan Egeland, Secretary-General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, acknowledged: “The chaos, yes, around the aid line is becoming worse and worse because there’s so little aid coming in […] you see the aid trucks going full speed down the road, being chased by gangs of youth who jumped the trucks and before our eyes, loot mattresses, blankets, food, et cetera, to the desperate people outside who want to get some aid.”

As more survivors spoke, more accounts circulated. Speaking to BBC Arabic, survivor Ramzi Rihan said: “We were informed that a shipment of flour would arrive through Al-Nabulsi Street and that there would be no shooting. We went to get flour to feed our children.

We went to Nabulsi Street and before the trucks arrived there was gunfire. As the trucks entered, we headed towards them, and as we tried to get the first bag of flour out of the truck, they began to fire at us.” Some witnesses described waiting to be loaded into donkey carts, whose operators made several trips to nearby hospitals to transport the wounded.

Others recalled being both shot and struck by aid trucks trying to leave. Still others contradicted these claims, contending that most of the injured were rammed or crushed by the aid trucks as people panicked and tried to escape the line of fire. Israel has called for a larger, more independent review, but when that review will come — or whether it would be conducted by people Israel’s opponents would accept as impartial — remains unknown.

International Outcry

As word of the tragedy spread, many nations moved quickly to stake out positions. Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia condemned Israel almost immediately, accusing it of deliberately attacking the civilians who became casualties at al-Rashid. The South American nation of Colombia announced it would stop importing weapons from Israel and likened Israel’s conduct in Gaza to genocide — a characterization that a growing number of nations have begun to endorse. China issued a strong condemnation and called for an immediate ceasefire to prevent future disasters of this kind.

No international response drew more scrutiny than that of the United States, Israel’s primary backer and chief advocate in great-power conversations about the war. President Joseph Biden expressed shock at the incident but simultaneously emphasized that Washington would attempt to weed through “two competing versions of what happened.” White House deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton explained that the US had spent weeks pressing Israel to produce plans for the basic security and safety of parts of Gaza where military operations had concluded — including the very area where the incident occurred, where Israel claims Hamas no longer maintains a presence. “We have yet to see those plans and we are deeply concerned about that,” Dalton said.

Inside the White House, the incident sharpened existing divisions. In an anonymous statement provided to NBC, several staffers wrote: “Saying there are two ‘versions’ of what happened when we have video proof of what occurred is absolutely disgusting. […] On Thursday morning we all woke up to a ‘Hunger Games’ style massacre, weaponizing starvation and over one hundred people dead and this administration’s response is that we need to clarify information? It’s baffling.”

The American response did go somewhat beyond requests for information. The day after the incident, the US took a unilateral and overtly symbolic step against Israel, authorizing an airdrop of humanitarian food aid directly into Gaza. “Aid flowing into Gaza is nowhere nearly enough… lives are on the line,” Biden said. “We should be getting hundreds of trucks in, not just several.

We’re going to pull out every stop we can.” Airdrops are a notoriously inefficient way to deliver supplies, but the message to the Israeli government was amplified precisely by America’s choice to pursue an inefficient and insufficient option rather than work through the corridors Israel controls. On March 4, the US also signed onto the idea of an independent UN review and noted that UN staff had already begun visiting hospitals to assess the nature of the wounds.

Elsewhere among Israel’s allies, the United Kingdom denounced the deaths and endorsed demands for an impartial investigation. France condemned “fire by Israeli soldiers against civilians trying to access food,” while Germany’s foreign minister demanded a full explanation. Writing on X, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said: “People wanted relief supplies for themselves and their families and found themselves dead. The reports from Gaza shock me.” She added that Gazans are “closer to dying than to living.”

A Blocked Resolution at the UN

At the United Nations, the dispute grew sharper still. In the hours after the incident, the UN Security Council convened a closed-door emergency meeting. Algeria, the Council’s current representative from the Arab world, offered a draft statement that would have blamed Israeli forces for “opening fire” and causing the deaths. Fourteen of the Council’s fifteen members supported it, including four permanent members — China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom — as well as close US allies Japan and South Korea, both current non-permanent members.

The United States blocked the resolution. Because of America’s permanent status, that veto rendered the statement dead in the water. Outside the Council chamber, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres offered a strong condemnation: “The desperate civilians in Gaza need urgent help, including those in the north where the UN has not been able to deliver aid in more than a week.”

The Ceasefire Clock

If the rest of the world agrees on anything in the aftermath of al-Rashid, it is that this latest mass-casualty incident underscores the urgent need for a ceasefire as soon as possible. Those calls grow more desperate as the Gaza Ministry of Health begins reporting the deaths of children in northern Gaza killed not by bullets or bombs but by dehydration and malnutrition. International humanitarian warnings increasingly stress that local children are approaching the tipping point into starvation more and more often, and that if food remains scarce, Gaza’s death toll could climb far more rapidly than it already has. More targeted aid has begun moving into the north, including a shipment of vaccines and formula milk that reached al-Shifa Hospital — but no single shipment can hope to make a meaningful difference.

In the immediate aftermath, Hamas officials said they expected the incident to put ceasefire talks in jeopardy, a view echoed by President Biden when asked about the consequences. Despite those early warning signs, the discussions continued to progress until March 5, when Hamas officials indicated that negotiations in the Egyptian capital of Cairo had stalled yet again. Hamas political leader Basem Naim said: “Netanyahu doesn’t want to reach an agreement […] the ball now is in the Americans’ court.”

The implication is that the United States will have to convince Israel to return to the table for any progress to be made. Hamas has signaled it plans to remain available for talks — and these are talks that the US had recently said came close to Israel accepting Hamas’s terms. Among the current points of disagreement, anonymous officials close to the negotiations cite the formation of a list of hostages Hamas would be willing to release.

Why that list has not materialized is not yet clear.

The deadline pressure is bound up with the Muslim holy month of fasting, Ramadan, slated to begin at sundown on Sunday, March 10. The holy month is the period a ceasefire would cover, likely lasting about six weeks. The urgency is not only a matter of respect for religion.

Fasting itself becomes very difficult and even dangerous for people already malnourished and without access to food. Worse, the religious significance across the Muslim world of a Muslim population being continually attacked during Ramadan is something that international observers — and the Biden administration — fear could become a flashpoint escalating violence beyond Gaza. That could include worse violence from the Houthis in the Red Sea, from Hezbollah to Israel’s north, or even the entry of new players, a list that in a worst-case scenario could draw Iran directly into the war.

The Countdown to Starvation

Ramadan or not, an even more important countdown is underway: the one determining how long each person in northern Gaza has left before starvation becomes unavoidable. About three hundred thousand people are believed to be living in northern Gaza, with very scarce food resources and very little access to clean water. According to the UN, one in six children under the age of two in northern Gaza is believed to be acutely malnourished, with that number only expected to rise.

Natalie Roberts, executive director of the UK branch of Doctors Without Borders, described the reality: “We know from our own colleagues that they’re having to eat animal food, that they go without food for days on end sometimes. And so people are just completely desperate, and the minute you start trying to deliver food to the region without any sort of security for the convoy, then this was always going to happen.” Beyond the United States, Jordan has organized unilateral airdrops of humanitarian supplies, and Canada is considering the same.

America completed a second airdrop alongside Jordan over recent days and appears poised to carry out further operations if conditions demand. The US has even floated delivering a ship’s worth of aid if road access remains restricted or handled the way Israel has been handling it. But for now, anything beyond the occasional airdrop is just talk — which means the countdown to starvation continues uninterrupted.

What the Incident Reveals

The violence of the Al-Rashid incident is a horrible tragedy no matter which version of events is ultimately confirmed. But what it is not — and this is painful to acknowledge — is a surprise. That people on the brink of starvation would gather around, and even try to stop and take from, a convoy they know is carrying rare and precious food aid should surprise no one. That an Israeli military accustomed to waging war inside Gaza with impunity, and to keeping order as it sees fit, would fire its weapons and shells from its tanks — whether as warning shots or not — should surprise no one either.

Whether those weapons were aimed above the heads of the crowd, at their legs and feet, or at their hearts and heads cannot yet be determined. But the very fact that the world is in a position to debate whether the deaths of over a hundred people, and the injuries of nearly or more than a thousand others, were a deliberate massacre or a tragic accident is itself a reflection of the dire conditions that made such an incident all but inevitable. People who fear they may starve will do everything they can to find food while they still have the strength.

Soldiers fighting an asymmetric war, expecting enemies around every corner, will perceive a surging crowd as a threat to their own lives. In those conditions, when an acute crisis erupts as it did on February 29, the dominoes fall as they are laid out — and people die.

There is no clean resolution to offer. A definitive finding, a clear perpetrator named and held to account, is not available, and while subsequent investigations may be conducted fairly and published transparently, that is not necessarily how this conflict works. Resolution on this incident may not come for a very long time. What can be said with confidence is how urgent it is that all parties work to change the conditions on the ground — through a ceasefire, a more comprehensive humanitarian aid program, or whatever else it takes.

Call it a massacre, call it a tragedy: the Al-Rashid incident of February 29 should not have happened. The burden now falls on all sides to ensure that the next incident like it never happens in the first place.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened on Al-Rashid Street on February 29, 2024?

Before dawn, an aid convoy moving north on Al-Rashid Street in northern Gaza became the site of a mass-casualty event near the al-Nabulsi roundabout. A large, hungry crowd had gathered ahead of the convoy’s arrival. By the end, Gaza health officials counted at least 112 dead and over 760 injured, with later estimates exceeding a thousand total casualties. Accounts of how those casualties occurred diverge sharply between an Israeli account centered on a stampede and witness accounts centered on Israeli gunfire.

What is the IDF’s explanation for the deaths?

The IDF’s preliminary review says the crowd rushed the aid trucks, and that Israeli soldiers fired warning shots from small arms and tanks to deter a stampede. The military maintains that most deaths resulted from the stampede itself — people crushed, trampled, or run over by aid trucks — and that Israeli forces only fired on individuals who posed a direct threat after the main incident had concluded. Spokesman Daniel Hagari described Israel’s actions as a “limited response.”

What do witnesses and doctors say happened?

Survivors, journalists, and medical staff describe a largely docile crowd that was fired upon, including with tracer ammunition, before a panic and stampede ensued. Doctors at al-Shifa and other hospitals reported that most injuries were gunshot and shrapnel wounds, many to the head and chest, with roughly 70 percent requiring surgery. Some survivors alleged fire from snipers, tanks, drones, and even naval forces on the nearby Mediterranean Sea.

How did the United States respond to the incident?

President Biden expressed shock but referred to “two competing versions of what happened.” The US blocked an Algerian-drafted UN Security Council statement that would have blamed Israeli forces — a statement supported by fourteen of the Council’s fifteen members. Washington authorized symbolic airdrops of food aid into Gaza and, on March 4, endorsed an independent UN review of the incident.

How did the incident affect ceasefire negotiations?

Hamas officials said they expected the incident to jeopardize talks, and Biden echoed that concern. Discussions in Cairo nonetheless continued until March 5, when Hamas said negotiations had stalled again, with leader Basem Naim placing the ball “in the Americans’ court.” The talks were further pressured by the approach of Ramadan and by the deepening starvation crisis facing roughly 300,000 people in northern Gaza.