On January 9, 2024, Israeli forces opened fire on civilians waiting for aid trucks bringing food into the north of the Gaza Strip, killing seven people and wounding several others.

The incident took place three months into Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in the Strip. Israeli authorities had ordered some 1.1 million people in the north of Gaza – half of the enclave’s population – to evacuate south, and were restricting the entry of food and other critical supplies in an apparent effort to starve out several hundred thousand Palestinians who had refused or were unable to leave.

The aid delivery on January 9 was one of the first to reach northern Gaza since the beginning of the 2023 invasion. Two days later, as desperate civilians waited for another expected aid delivery, Israeli forces once again opened fire, killing 12 and injuring dozens.

At least 2,957 Palestinians have been killed and 19,866 wounded. Attacks on people seeking aid are war crimes, crimes against humanity, and contribute to ongoing genocide in Gaza, according to legal experts.

Patterns in attacks show how they have been used as a tactic to achieve specific goals over time, from deadly crowd control to the destruction of people in Gaza’s collective ability to survive.

They have also been used in tandem with sieges, military operations and the strategic positioning of aid supplies in particular areas of Gaza to forcibly displace Palestinians from one region to another, potentially permanently.

The attacks have been enabled by impunity and inaction from Israel’s Western allies and the international community.

A few days after that, the same thing happened and then again a few days later, and then again and again – until the individual incidents became an undeniable pattern of attacks on people seeking aid that has persisted and escalated to the present day, killing almost 3,000 people and wounding nearly 20,000 over the past 23 months.

These attacks amount to a pattern of what legal experts say are evidently war crimes and crimes against humanity, being committed in broad daylight with impunity, as part of a project to displace and potentially destroy the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to survive as a group – a key aspect of the legal definition of genocide.

The lack of a concrete response from Israel’s allies and the international community to each attack, each atrocity, has only helped to enable those that have followed. And as Israeli forces learned they could act with impunity, the violence has also become more brazen.

Now, with Israel ordering the evacuation of Gaza City and pushing forward an invasion explicitly aimed at taking it over, the violence against aid seekers is being wielded as part of an apparent strategy to push Palestinians out of the north of Gaza – and potentially the entire enclave – perhaps permanently.

For over a year, The New Humanitarian has been conducting an open-source investigation documenting Israeli attacks on people seeking aid in Gaza. We have compiled a database of nearly 200 incidents that took place between January 2024 and the end of July this year, resulting in at least 1,215 people killed and 4,691 wounded.

These numbers are a conservative estimate and do not include attacks on people attempting to get aid from the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which began operating on May 27 this year.

In just over three months, Israeli forces have killed nearly 1,172 people in the vicinity of the GHF’s militarised food distribution sites and wounded many more – adding to the already staggering number of casualties among people seeking aid. These attacks are a direct outgrowth of the pattern that began in January 2024 and that continues to this day.

Over the past 23 months, counting the casualties we’ve recorded and numbers from the UN’s human rights office (OHCHR) and the ministry of health in Gaza from recent attacks at GHF sites and elsewhere in Gaza, these attacks have killed at least 2,957 people and wounded 19,866 as they tried to obtain the bare necessities of survival.

This accounts for around 4.6 per cent of the more than 64,000 deaths from Israel’s military campaign recorded by the ministry of health in Gaza, and just over 12 per cent of all wounded.

The frequency and lethality of attacks has dramatically escalated since the GHF began operating at the end of May. In the 17 months between January 2024 and May 27 this year, we recorded 663 fatalities. In just three months since then, more than 2,200 people have been killed.

Each of the attacks on aid seekers we have documented is a potential war crime. Some incidents, like the “Flour Massacre” on February 29, 2024, in which 118 people were killed and 760 wounded, have drawn international outrage and condemnation and precipitated calls for the attacks on aid seekers to end. But those calls have not been backed up by effective action, and the killings have continued.

Responding to a detailed request for comment, the Israeli military or Israel Defence Forces (IDF), did not address questions about these patterns of violence.

Instead, they sent a statement about casualties around GHF sites, saying they had examined reports of civilian harm and issued instructions to forces based on lessons learned.

The statement also said the IDF was working to “minimise possible friction” between people seeking food from the GHF and soldiers – including “through the installation of fences, signage placement, the opening of additional routes” and other unspecified measures around distribution sites, where troops have shot thousands of people.

The Israeli government media office did not respond to a request for comment.

In past cases of attacks on people seeking aid that have garnered enough attention to necessitate a public response, Israeli authorities have put forward various arguments to defend their actions. At times, they have outright denied responsibility, saying the incidents never happened or that unidentified attackers were responsible for the casualties.

They have also often argued that troops felt threatened and acted in self-defence or that they were targeting militants or Hamas-related infrastructure.

Looking at the incidents we recorded, those defences don’t hold up.

Over time, clearly discernible patterns have emerged as the same locations or same types of places have been repeatedly targeted. When aid agencies trucked food into northern Gaza in early 2024, Israeli troops shot people as they waited for the convoys. When the UN partnered with prominent families to manage the increasing chaos around these convoys, Israeli forces killed them.

Later in 2024, as Israel laid siege to the northernmost parts of Gaza, troops attacked locations where aid had been delivered shortly after aid workers left. In the spring of 2025, when people turned to soup kitchens as a main source of food, Israeli forces bombed the soup kitchens. And as Israeli-orchestrated famine set in this summer, when people began going to depopulated areas of northern Gaza to meet the few aid trucks allowed to enter, Israeli forces shot and bombed them in the thousands.

On multiple occasions when Israeli authorities have entirely cut off the flow of aid into Gaza, laid siege to specific areas, or when stocks have run out, strikes on people collecting aid have slowed or stopped. When aid has been allowed to resume, so has the killing. Put simply: Civilians in Gaza face death by starvation and deprivation when aid is blocked – or by fire when it has been allowed to resume.

The fact that these attacks have happened over and over again suggests they must be intentional, according to Adil Haque, an international law professor at Rutgers University in the US.

“These are not isolated incidents. They’re not just similar incidents. They are a pattern, and reflect policy and an acceptance on the part of the state that this should continue indefinitely,” Haque said.

Haque was one of several international legal and humanitarian experts The New Humanitarian consulted about the attacks on aid seekers and their legal implications. All agreed that these patterns contribute to a substantial body of evidence supporting legal arguments that Israel is committing numerous war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza.

• A Tell Media report / Republished with the permission of The New Humanitarian