[Source: Reuters]

Thousands of Palestinians stormed into sites where aid was being distributed on Tuesday by a foundation backed by the U.S. and Israel, with desperation for food overcoming concern about biometric and other checks Israel said it would employ.

By late afternoon on Tuesday, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said it had distributed about 8,000 food boxes, equivalent to about 462,000 meals, after an almost three-month-old Israeli blockade of the war-devastated enclave.

In the southern city of Rafah, which is under full Israeli army control, thousands of people, including women and children, some on foot or in donkey carts, flocked towards one of the distribution sites to receive food packages.

Videos, some of which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed lines of people walking through a wire-fenced corridor and into a large open field where aid was stacked. Later, images shared on social media showed large parts of the fence torn down as people jostled their way onto the site.

Israel and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said, without providing evidence, that Hamas, Gaza’s dominant militant group, had tried to block civilians from reaching the aid distribution centre.

Hamas denied the accusation.

“The real cause of the delay and collapse in the aid distribution process is the tragic chaos caused by the mismanagement of the same company operating under the Israeli occupation’s administration in those buffer zones,” Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office, told Reuters.

“This has led to thousands of starving people, under the pressure of siege and hunger, storming distribution centres and seizing food, during which Israeli forces opened fire,” he added.

The Israeli military said its troops fired warning shots in the area outside the compound and that control was reestablished.

A U.N. spokesperson called images of the incident “heartbreaking.”

Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein wrote on X that 8,000 “food packages” were delivered to Palestinians on Tuesday, the first day of what he described as an American initiative.

Some of the recipients showed the content of the packages, which included some rice, flour, canned beans, pasta, olive oil, biscuits and sugar.

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