One of the witnesses, Mohammad Hamoudeh, a photographer in Gaza City, said that he did not see any Israeli forces or the weapons that fired on the crowd. But he said that heavy Israeli fire from a distance appeared to be responsible for the casualties.
“The cannons and tank shells are what targeted the civilians,” he said.
“I escaped by a miracle; we saw death with our eyes,” he said. Referring to the earlier convoy disaster, he said: “It was almost the same scenario as the Nabulsi incident. There were many martyrs. The scene was horrifying.”
Even after the bloodshed, people collected what aid they could, he said, including sacks of flour that had been bloodied.
Ali Al Ajouri, a 16-year-old from Jabaliah, also described shelling on the crowd. “There were some 30 people gathering in one spot, and a shell shot them directly,” he said.
Dr. Eid Sabbah, the head of nursing at the Kamal Adwan Hospital, said: “It wasn’t gunfire. It was ammunition from heavy weaponry that cause large openings; that’s obvious from the entrance and exit wounds.”
Dr. Sabbah said the patients who were treated at the hospital had mostly chest and head wounds. Doctors there could only stabilize them and keep them alive, he said, and were unable to perform surgery because of the lack of medicine and medical tools.
Ibrahim Al Najjar, 42, an unemployed taxi driver, said he was in the area around 8 p.m. when a large crowd had gathered. Soon, there was shelling and shooting, he said. He said that his cousin was killed and that he was injured in his right arm by shrapnel.
“I ran for my life with others, and then they hit a building next to us,” he said. “We kept running until we reached some ambulances far away.”
The Israeli military said it was not responsible for the attack. “Approximately one hour before the arrival of the convoy to the humanitarian corridor, armed Palestinians opened fire while Gazan civilians were awaiting the arrival of the aid convoy,” the military said. “As aid trucks were entering, the Palestinian gunmen continued to shoot as the crowd of Gazans began looting the trucks. Additionally, a number of Gazan civilians were run over by the trucks.”