Ahmed Yousaf made the comments to Al Jazeera from the Jordanian capital, Amman, on Tuesday, hours after returning from Gaza, where he had spent two and a half weeks working at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir el-Balah and al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
The doctor said he witnessed “mass casualty incidents” from Israeli shootings at the distribution points run by the United States-backed GHF on an almost daily basis.
The boys and young men came in with very specific injuries, “almost like a daily pattern”, he said.
“Meaning on a given day, say Monday, we’d get 40,60 patients coming in at a given time, and they would all be shot in the legs, or in the pelvic area, or the groin on a given day, just kind of a similar pattern. And the next day, we would see upper body, chest, thoracic pattern, and then there were days we saw only head wounds, upper neck bullet wounds. And what it felt like… was that somebody behind the gun that day was going to choose the way they were either going to maim or decide to kill people,” he said.
“It was age indiscriminate.”
Yousaf’s comments are the latest by medical staff in Gaza accusing Israeli forces and US contractors of targeted and indiscriminate violence at the GHF sites.
Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said last week that the GHF-run food distributions in famine-stricken Gaza have become sites of “orchestrated killing and dehumanization“, while Human Rights Watch said the shootings amount to serious violations of international law and war crimes.
On Tuesday alone, at least 19 aid seekers were killed at GHF sites in Gaza, while many more were wounded, according to medics and witnesses.
At least 1,838 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid, and another 13,409 have been wounded since the GHF began its operations in late May, official figures show.
Israel has in some instances acknowledged opening fire at the GHF sites, but denies deliberately targeting civilians.
Yousaf, the US pediatrician, said the victims at the GHF sites were mainly boys and young men, as they are often the ones taking the risk to try to get food for their families, “given the dynamic of the risk associated with trying to carry a 5-pound (2.3kg) bag of flour, maybe kilometers, sometimes”.
“The people would tell us they were sometimes at the site, or around the area, or they were trying to leave… and they were shot indiscriminately; it was like they were being sprayed. It seemed quite obvious to them and to us, from a pattern-recognition perspective… that on a given day, whoever was making the decision behind the trigger was choosing a very specific pattern of fire,” he said.
The doctor went on to describe all of Gaza as a “death trap”.
“It is a cage in which people are being marked for death. It almost feels like there is a quota for the number of people that need to be killed on a given day,” Yousaf said.
On the days that Palestinians stayed away from the GHF sites, because Israel had allowed in more aid trucks, there would be more intense air attacks, he said.