France wants to distribute food in Gaza

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Saturday that France “is ready, like Europe, to contribute to the security of food distribution” in the war-torn Palestinian territory of Gaza.

Speaking on the LCI news channel, the head of French diplomacy considered that this would respond to “the issue that concerns the Israeli authorities, that is, the misappropriation of this humanitarian aid by armed groups”, referring, without naming it, to the radical Palestinian group Hamas.

Barrot did not specify what the French and European aid would consist of, but expressed his “indignation” referring to the “500 people (…) who died distributing food” in Gaza in recent weeks.

Israel partially eased, at the end of May, the total blockade imposed on the Palestinian territory in early March and which led to severe shortages of food, medicine and other essential goods.

A humanitarian aid distribution mechanism managed by the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has been established, but its operations have led to chaotic and deadly situations.

According to the Hamas government's Health Ministry in Gaza, nearly 550 people have been killed and more than 4,000 injured in the huge queues that have formed to reach various aid distribution centers since the GHF began its operations in late May.

The Civil Defense of the Palestinian territory, devastated by more than 20 months of war, announced on Friday that 80 people had been killed in Israeli airstrikes or shootings, including 10 while waiting for humanitarian aid.

Speaking to Agence France Presse, an Israeli army source said that these allegations were being investigated, but categorically denied that soldiers had fired on people waiting for help.

On Friday, the UN secretary-general warned that the aid system imposed by Israel in Gaza was “killing people”, stressing that “any operation that takes desperate civilians into militarised zones is inherently unsafe”.

António Guterres was speaking after the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an investigation which revealed that Israeli soldiers responsible for supervising the delivery of food were ordered to deliberately fire into the crowd, before and after the distribution.

In a reaction to Guterres’ statements, Israel’s Foreign Ministry accused the UN of “doing everything it can to oppose this [GHF assistance] effort.”

“By doing so, the UN is aligning itself with Hamas, which is also trying to sabotage the GHF’s humanitarian operations,” Israeli diplomacy said in a statement, adding that “blaming Israel for the UN’s failures and Hamas’ actions is a deliberate tactic.”

The war in the Palestinian enclave was triggered by an attack by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas on Israeli soil, on October 7, 2023, which caused around 1,200 deaths, most of them civilians, and took more than 200 hostages.

In retaliation, Israel launched a military operation in the Gaza Strip, which has already caused more than 56,000 deaths, according to local authorities controlled by Hamas, the destruction of almost all of the territory's infrastructure and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.