The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says that “hordes of hungry people” have broken into a food supply warehouse in central Gaza.
Two people are reported to have died and several others injured in the incident, the programme said, adding that it was still confirming details.
Footage showed thousands of people breaking into the Al-Ghafari warehouse in Deir Al-Balah and taking bags of flour and cartons of food as gunshots rang out. It was not immediately clearwhere the gunshots came from or who fired them.
In a statement, the WFP said humanitarian needs in Gaza had “spiralled out of control” after an almost three-month Israeli blockade that was eased last week.
The WFP said that food supplies had been pre-positioned at the warehouse for distribution.
The programme added: “Gaza needs an immediate scale-up of food assistance. This is the only way to reassure people that they will not starve.”
The WFP said it had “consistently warned of alarming and deteriorating conditions on the ground, and the risks imposed by limiting humanitarian aid to hungry people in desperate need of assistance”.
Israeli authorities said on Wednesday that 121 trucks belonging to the UN and the international community carrying humanitarian aid including flour and food were transferred into Gaza.
Israel began to allow a limited amount of aid into Gaza last week. However, UN Middle East envoy Sigrid Kaag told the UN Security Council this was “comparable to a lifeboat after the ship has sunk” when everyone in Gaza was facing the risk of famine.
A controversial US and Israeli-backed group – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) – was also established as a private aid distribution system. It uses US security contractors and bypasses the UN, which said it was unworkable and unethical.
The US and Israeli governments say the GHF, which has set up four distribution centres in southern and central Gaza, is preventing aid from being stolen by Hamas, which the armed group denies doing.
Large numbers of hungry people living in tents along the coast of Gaza have been going to the GHF distribution centres for food.
The UN Humans Right Office said 47 people were injured on Tuesday after people overran one of the GHF distribution sites in the southern city of Rafah, a day after it began working there.
Another senior UN official told journalists on Wednesday that desperate crowds were looting cargo off of UN aid trucks.
Jonathan Whittall, the head of the UN’s humanitarian office for the occupied Palestinian territories, also said there was no evidence that Hamas was diverting aid coordinated through credible humanitarian channels.
He said the real theft of relief goods since the beginning of the war had been carried out by criminal gangs which the Israeli army “allowed to operate in proximity to the Kerem Shalom crossing point in Gaza”.
The UN has argued that a surge of aid like the one during the recent ceasefire between Israeli and Hamas would reduce the threat of looting by hungry people and allow it to make full use of its well-established network of distribution across the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said the UN was behaving in a “mafia-like” way and accused it of threatening aid agencies working with the GHF.
The UN has said Israeli’s new aid distribution system in Gaza is “essentially engineered scarcity”, adding that it operates only in the south of the territory when most of the population is in the north.
