Video footage is from international news agencies. It shows that a crowd in Central Gaza broke into the Ghafari warehouse in Deir al-Balah and took bags of flour and cartons of food as gunshots rang outside. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says that a “horde of hungry people” have broken into a food supply warehouse in Gaza, during which two people are reported dead, while several others were injured in the incident. Full details are yet to be confirmed.

According to WFP, food supplies had been pre-positioned at the warehouse for distribution. When the news broke out, people rushed towards the food supplies due to the acute shortage of edible food in the war-hit area.

“There needs to be an image scale of food assistance. This is the only way to reassure people that they will not starve,” the WFP noted.

WFP Programme

According to WFP, it had “consistently warned of alarming and retrograde conditions on the ground, and the risk imposed by limiting humanitarian access to hungry people in desperate need of assistance.”

Israeli authorities said on Wednesday that a total of 121 trucks, by the United Nations and other international communities, carrying humanitarian aid, including flour and food, were transferred into Gaza. Israel began to allow only a limited amount of aid into Gaza last week.

According to the UN Middle East envoy Sigrid Kaag, this was “comparable to a lifeboat after the ship has sunk” as everyone in Gaza was facing the risk of famine. Another senior UN official also told journalists on Wednesday that the desperate crowd in Central Gaza was looting cargo off a UN truck. He said that the real theft of relief goods since the beginning of the war has been carried out by criminal gangs, which the Israeli army “allowed to operate in proximity to the Kerem Shalom crossing point in Gaza.”