JERUSALEM: Israel's army said Friday its initial probe into an incident that left more than 100 Gazans dead as crowds rushed an aid convoy found troops "fired precisely" at approaching suspects.
On February 29, world leaders had called for an investigation into the incident when the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said Israeli forces opened fire on people scrambling for food from a truck convoy.
The Israeli military said at the time that a "stampede" occurred when thousands of people surrounded the convoy. Releasing its initial findings on Friday, the military said in a statement that the "command review" found that "troops did not fire at the humanitarian convoy."
It added, however, that they "did fire at a number of suspects who approached the nearby forces and posed a threat to them."
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, in an updated toll issued Friday, said 120 people were killed in the February 29 incident and at least 750 others were wounded.
Witnesses said thousands of people had rushed towards aid trucks in Gaza City early that morning and that soldiers "fired at the crowd as people came too close to the tanks."
A United Nations team that visited Gaza City's Al-Shifa hospital the day after the incident reported seeing "a large number of gunshot wounds" among dozens of Palestinian patients.
In its statement on Friday, the military said about 12,000 Palestinians had gathered around the aid trucks and began taking the supplies.
"During the course of the looting, incidents of significant harm to civilians occurred from the stampede and people being run over by the trucks," the army said.
At that time, "dozens of Gazans advanced towards nearby IDF (Israeli army) troops, up to several metres (yards) from them, and thereby posed a real threat to the forces at that point," it said.
The military said troops "fired cautionary fire in order to distance the suspects," and after they continued to advance, "the troops fired precisely towards a number of suspects to remove the threat."
The announcement came more than five months into its ongoing war against the Hamas militant group in Gaza.
The war began on October 7 when Hamas launched a devastating attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
During the attack, Gaza militants also took about 250 Israeli and foreign hostages, some of whom were released during a week-long truce in November. Israel believes 99 hostages remain alive in Gaza and that 31 have died.
Israel's military responded to the attack with an offensive in Gaza that has killed at least 30,878 people in the Palestinian territory, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry.
