President Joe Biden has said that the US military would drop humanitarian aid into Gaza in the coming days, and that Washington would be doing everything it could to get more aid into the enclave.
Mr Biden, speaking in the White House's Oval Office, said the aid flow into Gaza was not nearly enough and that he wanted hundreds of more aid trucks to get in.
Meanwhile, pressure has mounted on Israel over the deaths of Palestinians queuing for aid in an incident during which its soldiers fired at the crowd, with several countries backing a UN call for an inquiry.
Gaza health authorities said Israeli forces had killed more than 100 people trying to reach a relief convoy near Gaza City early yesterday, with famine looming nearly five months into the war that began with a Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October.
At least 112 people were killed and more than 280 wounded in the incident near Gaza City, Palestinian health officials said.
Israel blamed most of the deaths on crowds that swarmed around aid trucks, saying victims had been trampled or run over. An Israeli official also said troops had "in a limited response" later fired on crowds they felt had posed a threat.
The incident has underscored the collapse of orderly aid deliveries in areas of Gaza occupied by Israeli forces with no administration in place and the main UN agency UNRWA hamstrung by an inquiry into alleged links with Hamas.
The Hamas attack on 7 October killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and involved the seizure of 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel's military campaign has since killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, health authorities in the Hamas-run enclave say.
With a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, many countries have urged a ceasefire, but Mr Biden said yesterday's incident will complicate talks for a deal involving a truce and hostage release.
France and Germany have backed a call for an international inquiry. The US has also urged an inquiry.
India said it was "deeply shocked" at the deaths and Brazil said the incident was beyond "ethical or legal limits".
South Africa, which has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, condemned the deaths. Israel denies genocide.
French President Emmanuel Macron voiced "deep indignation" and the "strongest condemnation of these shootings". Germany said "the Israeli army must fully explain how the mass panic and shooting could have happened".
Israel's closest ally, the United States, has also urged a thorough investigation, saying the incident shows the need for "expanded humanitarian aid to make its way into Gaza".
In Israel, ultra-rightwing security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir urged "total support" to Israeli soldiers who had "acted excellently against a Gazan mob that tried to harm them".
However, an opinion piece on the N12 online news site said the incident showed the lack of any civil administration or rule of law in Gaza, and that this "may place Israel in a difficult position in terms of legitimacy for continuing the fighting".
A columnist in the biggest daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said the incident would "create a turning point in the war" and could "exert international pressure that Israel will not be able to withstand, including from the White House," it said.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said he was "shocked" by the latest episode and it would require an effective independent investigation.
Humanitarian disaster
A humanitarian disaster is unfolding in Gaza Strip, particularly the north, after nearly five months of an Israeli air and ground campaign that has ruined swathes of the crowded coastal enclave and pushed it to the edge of famine.
With people eating animal feed and even cactuses to survive, and with medics saying children are dying in hospitals from malnutrition and dehydration, the UN has said it faces "overwhelming obstacles" getting in aid.
The UN humanitarian agency OCHA said obstacles included "crossing closures, restrictions on movement and communications, onerous vetting procedures, unrest, damaged roads and unexploded ordnance."
Last week the UN said aid flows into Gaza were drying up and it was becoming increasingly hard to distribute aid within the enclave because of a collapse in security, with most residents hemmed into makeshift camps.
Israel has said there is no limit on humanitarian aid in Gaza and has said the quantity and pace of delivery was down to the UN.
Israel's military said yesterday's delivery was operated by private contractors as part of an aid operation it had been overseeing for the previous four days.
One Israeli official said there had been two incidents, hundreds of metres apart. In the first, dozens were killed or injured as they tried to take aid from the trucks and were trampled or run over.
He said there was a second, subsequent incident as the trucks moved off. Some people in the crowd approached troops who felt under threat and opened fire, killing an unknown number in a "limited response", he said.
He dismissed the casualty toll given by Gaza authorities but gave no figure himself.
In a later briefing, Israel Defence Forces spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari also said dozens had been trampled to death or injured in a fight to take supplies off the trucks.
He said tanks escorting the trucks had subsequently fired warning shots to disperse the crowd and backed away when events began to get out of hand. "No IDF strike was conducted towards the aid convoy," he said.
"The IDF was there conducting a humanitarian operation to secure the humanitarian corridor and allow the aid convoy to reach its designated distribution point."
The US State Department said it was urgently seeking information on the incident as did the French foreign ministry.
Hamas issued a statement rejecting the Israeli account.
It said the Health Ministry had presented "undeniable" evidence of "direct firing at citizens, including head shots aimed at immediate killing, in addition to the testimonies of all witnesses who confirmed being targeted with direct fire without posing any threat to the occupying army".
One video shared on social media, whose location Reuters was able to verify, showed trucks loaded with many dead bodies as well as wounded people.
Another, which Reuters could not verify, showed bloodstained people being carried in a truck, bodies wrapped in shrouds and doctors treating injured patients on the hospital floor.
"We don't want aid like this. We don't want aid and bullets together. There are many martyrs," a man said in one of the videos.
The Pentagon expressed alarm but declined to assign any blame. "These are human beings that are trying to feed themselves" Air Force Major General Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesperson, told a news briefing. "We're all kind of looking at that and saying: 'What happened here'?".
OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke said the aid delivery was made without any coordination with the UN.
The war has driven out the Hamas-run government that previously administered Gaza and rendered municipal police helpless, while the work of the main UN agency operating in the enclave has been constrained by Israeli accusations it was complicit in the 7 October attack, which it denies.
"This tragic massacre, as some are calling it, is an illustration of why UNRWA needs to be distributing aid in Gaza to stave off mass starvation, which has already begun," said Chris Gunness, a former UNRWA spokesperson.
"It's an illustration that you cannot leave the protection of the Palestinians in Gaza in terms of food security to the Israelis," he added.
Gaza death toll tops 30,000
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says the wartime death toll has reached 30,228 after 193 new fatalities were recorded in the previous 24 hours.
The ministry also said 920 injuries were tallied in the same period in the besieged territory, bringing the total wounded from Israel's nearly five-month-old war against Hamas to 71,377.
The Israeli offensive was launched after a 7 October attack in which Israel said Hamas gunmen killed 1,200 people and abducted 253.
Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble and most of its 2.3 million population have been displaced from their homes at least once.
Aid deliveries to northern Gaza have been sparse and chaotic, passing through more active military zones to an area where the UN says many are starving, with videos showing desperate crowds surging around supply trucks.
UN and other relief agencies have complained that Israel has blocked or restricted their attempts to get aid in. Israel denies putting any restrictions on humanitarian aid.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN Palestinian aid agency UNRWA, told reporters in Jerusalem that the supply of aid into Gaza as a whole had halved since January.
