The flour massacre

By late February 2024 northern Gaza was starving. Aid deliveries had almost entirely stopped, and when word spread that a convoy of food trucks might reach Gaza City in the early hours of Thursday 29 February, hundreds of people made their way to the seafront Al Rashid Road and waited around small fires in the bitter cold.

What happened at the Nabulsi roundabout entered the record within hours. The photographer Shukri Fleifel, twenty-one, described two Israeli tanks coming down the coastal road at about 4:30 a.m., firing into the air to disperse the crowds; when the trucks arrived and people rushed toward the flour, the fire turned into the crowd, from the north and then from the south. Gaza’s Ministry of Health said at least 112 people were killed and more than 750 wounded. The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned what it called a cold-blooded massacre; the day was remembered at once, bitterly, as the flour massacre — people killed for bread.

The archive keeps the day the way it keeps every mass killing: through a name. Bilal el-Essi, twenty-eight, football-mad, quick with a joke, had gone to the shore with two of his brothers to bring flour home. His record is in the Gaza file, told by the family that could not stop him going out to look for food.

Sources

• ‘Massacre’: Dozens killed by Israeli fire in Gaza while collecting food aid — Al Jazeera
• Killed trying to keep his family alive: one man’s death at Gaza aid convoy — The Guardian