Five people were killed and ten others injured on Friday March 8 by the fall of humanitarian aid packages dropped by planes on Gaza City, Agence France-Presse learned from a hospital source.
The accident occurred in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, during an airdrop operation of humanitarian aid, Mohammed told the news agency al-Chiekh, head nurse in the emergency department of Al-Shifa Hospital.
For several days, the United States and other countries, such as Jordan and France, have been carrying out air drops of food aid on the Gaza Strip besieged by Israel, in the grip of a major humanitarian crisis and threatened with famine, according to the UN.
“The parachute did not open”
“When the planes started dropping the cargo, me and my brother went to the area hoping to get a bag of flour”said Mohammed al-Ghoul, a 50-year-old man living in this camp located near the sea.
“But the parachute did not open and the cargo fell like a rocket onto the roof of one of the houses”he explained, specifying that he then saw people transporting three bodies, and saw injured people among the people who had gathered on the roof of the building to try to recover packages.
The Palestinian territory, where 2.4 million people live, has been the scene of a major Israeli offensive since the unprecedented Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. This attack carried out by commandos of the Palestinian Islamist movement left 1,160 dead in Israel, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count based on official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory operation, which vowed to annihilate Hamas, left 30,878 people dead in the Gaza Strip, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas health ministry.