The day after the death, according to Hamas, of more than 110 people during an aid distribution in Gaza after Israeli fire, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stéphane Séjourné, called for “an independent investigation” on Friday. 1st of March. “I want to be very clear today, we will ask for explanations, and it will take an independent investigation to determine what happened,” he told France Inter.
Earlier, during the night from Thursday to Friday, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, expressed on his targeted by Israeli soldiers. The Head of State “expresses his strongest disapproval of these shots and demands truth, justice and respect for international law,” he also said. “France says things,” explained Mr. Séjourné on Friday morning. She says things when it comes to calling Hamas terrorist. But she must also say things when atrocities are happening in Gaza. »
The health ministry in the Hamas-administered Gaza Strip on Thursday described the situation as a “massacre,” saying the Israeli army opened fire on the crowd, leaving at least 112 dead and 760 injured. For its part, Israel only recognized “limited fire” from its soldiers feeling “threatened”, evoking “dozens of dead and wounded (…) in a stampede”. “We observed gunshot wounds in all areas of the body, the hands, the legs, the abdomen and the chest,” Doctor Mohamed Salha, who works at Al-Awda hospital, nevertheless told Le Monde. .
China “strongly condemns”
Asked Thursday about the dozens of deaths in Gaza, US President Joe Biden replied: “We are checking that right now. There are two contradictory versions (…). I don’t have an answer yet. » “We have been in contact with the Israeli government since early this morning and we understand that an investigation is underway,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller later told reporters. We will monitor this investigation closely and press for answers. » For its part, China, through a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said on Friday that it was “deeply saddened by this incident” which it “vigorously condemns”.
The head of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, stressed on X that “neither UNRWA nor any other UN agency was involved in this distribution.” The Israeli army claims that the trucks, which entered Gaza from the Rafah crossing, on the Egyptian border, were chartered by “private companies”.
The UN Security Council met urgently behind closed doors on Thursday evening. “This monstrous massacre is proof that as long as the Security Council is paralyzed and vetoes [are] imposed, Palestinians are paying with their lives,” Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour told the press. “The Security Council should say “enough,” he insisted. If they have the courage and determination to prevent these massacres from happening again, what we need is a ceasefire. » Even if the American president is agitating behind the scenes to achieve a truce between Hamas and Israel, the United States blocked on February 20, for the third time, a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, threatened by famine.
