TWENTY PEOPLE WERE killed when an aid truck overturned today near the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, the territory’s civil defence agency said.

It was the latest in a series of now daily fatal incidents related to aid distribution in the devastated Palestinian enclave. 

“Twenty people were killed and dozens injured around midnight last night in a truck carrying aid overturned… while hundreds of civilians were waiting for aid,” the agency’s spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told news agency AFP.

The incident took place near the refugee camp, as the truck was driving on an unsafe road that Israel had previously bombed, Bassal added.

The Israeli military told the AFP news agency it was looking into the reports.

Hamas accused Israel of forcing truck drivers to take dangerous routes to reach aid distribution centres to “intentionally engineer… starvation and chaos.”

Israel “forces drivers to navigate routes overcrowded with starving civilians who have been waiting for weeks for the most basic necessities,” Hamas’s media office said in a statement.

“This often results in desperate crowds swarming the trucks,” it added.

Today the medical NGO Doctors Without Borders(MSF) said the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which has taken over most aid distribution since late May, “must be shut down”.

“Children shot in the chest while reaching for food. People crushed or suffocated in stampedes. Entire crowds gunned down at distribution points,” said Raquel Ayora, MSF General Director. “In MSF’s nearly 54 years of operations, rarely have we seen such levels of systematic violence against unarmed civilians.”

“The GHF distribution sites masquerading as ‘aid’ have morphed into a laboratory of cruelty,” Ayora said. “This must stop now.”

Patients treated by MSF in Gaza have given accounts of massacres near GHF distribution sites. 

Related Reads

World watches in horror and the IDF is sceptical, so will Netanyahu order full occupation?

The Explainer: Will more countries recognising Palestine make any real difference?

Gaza mother: 'My children ask for food, and I can give them nothing'

“We’re being slaughtered. I’ve been injured maybe 10 times,” said Mohammed Riad Tabasi, who was treated at an Al-Mawasi clinic.

“I saw it with my own eyes, about 20 corpses around me. All of them shot in the head, in the stomach.”

With reporting from AFP

Need more information on what is happening in Israel and Palestine? Check out our FactCheck Knowledge Bank for essential reads and guides to navigating the news online.