By Olivia Le Poidevin
GENEVA (Reuters) – Doctors in the Gaza Strip are donating their own blood to save their patients after scores of Palestinians were gunned down while trying to get food aid, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Thursday.
Around 100 MSF staff protested outside the UN headquarters in Geneva against an aid distribution system in Gaza run by an Israeli-backed private company, which has led to chaotic scenes of mass carnage.
“People need the basics of life…they also need it in dignity,” MSF Switzerland’s director general, Stephen Cornish, told Reuters at the protest.
“If you’re fearing for your life, running with packages being mowed down, this is just something that is completely beyond everything we’ve ever seen,” he said. “These attacks have killed dozens…They were left to bleed out on the ground.”
Cornish said staff at one of the hospitals where MSF operates had to give blood as most Palestinians are now too poorly nourished to donate.
Israel allowed the private Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to begin food distribution in Gaza last week, after having completely shut the Gaza Strip to all supplies since the beginning of March.
Gaza authorities say at least 102 Palestinians were killed and nearly 500 wounded trying to get aid from the food distribution sites in the first eight days.
Eyewitnesses have said Israeli forces fired on crowds. The Israeli military said Hamas militants were to blame for opening fire, though it acknowledged that on Tuesday, when at least 27 people died, that its troops had fired at “suspects” who approached their positions.
The United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution on Wednesday supported by all other Council members, which would have called for an “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” in Gaza and unhindered access for aid.
(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin; Editing by Peter Graff)
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