Israel has killed nearly 3,000 Gaza aid seekers

Over the past 23 months, Israeli forces have killed nearly 3,000 people attempting to get aid in the Gaza Strip and wounded almost 20,000 others. For over a year, The New Humanitarian has been conducting an open-source investigation documenting these killings, which we are now publishing as a publicly accessible database and timeline.

Since the end of May, when the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began operating, the attacks on people seeking aid have dramatically escalated, drawing global attention and condemnation.

But these attacks are not an aberration. They represent the escalation of a deadly tactic that has been a key part of Israeli strategy – a tactic that has helped precipitate a famine, enable the now-routine slaughter of people trying to collect food and other essential supplies, and deny Palestinians the basic necessities required to sustain life in Gaza.

Our database contains information on almost 200 attacks on people seeking aid in Gaza between January 2024 and the end of July this year, resulting in over 1,200 people killed and nearly 4,700 wounded. These numbers are a conservative estimate and do not include attacks or casualty figures near GHF sites, which opened on 27 May. We paused our documentation at the end of July in order to have adequate time to fact-check incidents before publication.