Attacks on Aid in Gaza: Preliminary Findings

As part of our in-depth investigation into Israel’s attacks on aid in Gaza since October 2023, we are releasing a series of preliminary findings and a map of the attacks we have documented to date.

Reporting on aid has predominantly focused on the number of trucks entering Gaza, despite reports on the ground from civilians and staff of NGOs and other governmental organisations indicating that Israeli obstruction of aid goes well beyond merely restricting entry. Our analysis aims to expand the scope of obstruction by centring on the Israeli destruction of infrastructure necessary for the safe and effective distribution and receipt of what little aid is permitted into the Strip.

We have broken these attacks down into four distinct categories: attacks on civilians seeking aid; attacks on aid infrastructure, including distribution and administrative centres; attacks on aid convoys; and attacks on personnel responsible for aid distribution. Incidents from each category can be traced temporally and geographically within our interactive map.

Significantly, our analysis shows that the Israel military has engaged in attacks on aid, as we have defined it here, at least eighty times since January 2024 and at least forty times since March 2024 alone. The frequency and widespread nature of these attacks, visualised within our map, indicate a pattern of systematic targeting, such that the mechanisms for distributing, accessing, and organising aid have been critically compromised.

Our preliminary findings also indicate the following:

• Civilians trying to access aid have been repeatedly targeted.
• All 39 attacks on civilians seeking aid we have documented occurred near the Israeli-controlled and -installed checkpoints on Salah al-Din Street and al-Rashid Street.
• Israel has repeatedly targeted the infrastructure supporting aid distribution, particularly in Israeli-designated ‘North Gaza’, including community centres, police stations, water trucks, and water stations.
• Israel has targeted at least fifteen personnel responsible for the civilian coordination of aid across Gaza, exacerbating the difficulty of aid distribution in an already desperate situation.

The map published here is not exhaustive and will be continuously updated as our research on aid develops. Each incident mapped here has been sourced from media coverage, or statements and reports from local and international organisations. The circles on the map serve as symbolic regional indicators of the approximate locations of one or more incidents, while the points on the map represent incidents that have been precisely geolocated.