Later on Monday, UN human rights chief Volker Türk told the BBC the way humanitarian aid is now being delivered is “unacceptable” and “dehumanising”.

“I think what it shows is utter disregard for civilians. Can you imagine people that have been absolutely desperate for food, for medicine, for almost three months and then they have to run for it or try to get it in the most desperate circumstances?” he told the BBC World Service’s Newshour programme.

“It does show a huge dehumanisation of the people who are desperately in need.”

The Civil Defence agency said 31 people were killed and 176 wounded “after Israeli gunfire targeted thousands of civilians near the American aid centre in Rafah” early on Sunday morning.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Red Cross Field Hospital in Rafah received a “mass casualty influx” of 179 cases, including women and children, at that time.

The majority suffered gunshot or shrapnel wounds, and 21 were declared dead upon arrival, it said, adding “all patients said they had been trying to reach an aid distribution site”.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said that its teams at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis also treated people with serious injuries, some of whom were in a critical condition.

It added the patients “reported being shot at from all sides by Israeli drones, helicopters, boats, tanks and soldiers”, and that one staff member’s brother was “killed while attempting to collect aid from the distribution centre”.

Dr Ahmed Abu Sweid, an Australian medic volunteering at Nasser hospital, said in a video that the casualties “ended up presenting with gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds”.

“Some of them arrived dead on arrival because of severe targeted gunshot wounds to the head and thorax,” he added.

Mohammed Ghareeb, a local journalist in Rafah, told the BBC that a crowd of Palestinians had gathered near al-Alam roundabout, close to the GHF aid centre, at around 04:30 local time (02:30 BST) when Israeli tanks approached and opened fire.

“The dead and wounded lay on the ground for a long time,” he said.

“Rescue crews could not access the area, which is under Israeli control. This forced residents to use donkey carts to transport victims to the field hospital.”

One video posted online on Sunday morning appeared to show Palestinians taking cover in an open area of sandy terrain while what sounds like automatic gunfire rings out. However, the BBC was unable to verify the location because there are not enough features visible.

Another video filmed by a witness showed people carrying aid past bodies on the ground.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) put out a statement on Sunday afternoon that said an initial inquiry indicated its troops “did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the humanitarian aid distribution site and that reports to this effect are false”.

Spokesman Brig Gen Effie Defrin accused Hamas of “spreading rumours” and “trying bluntly and violently to stop the people of Gaza from reaching those distribution centres”.

The IDF also released drone video it said showed armed men firing at civilians on their way to collect aid, although the BBC was unable to verify where or when it was filmed.

Later on Sunday, an Israeli military official briefed reporters that soldiers had acted to “prevent a number of suspects from approaching the forces” approximately 1km from the GHF site, before it opened.

“Warning shots were fired,” the official said, before insisting there was “no connection between the incident in question and the false allegations against the IDF”.

The GHF said in a statement on Monday that the reports were “the most egregious in terms of outright fabrications and misinformation fed to the international media community.

“There were no injuries, fatalities or incidents during our operations yesterday. Period. We have yet to see any evidence that there was an attack at or near our facility.”

The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, accused major news outlets of “reckless and irresponsible reporting” on the matter.

“Drone video and first-hand accounts clearly showed that there were no injuries, no fatalities, no shooting, no chaos,” he said on Monday.

“The only source for these misleading, exaggerated, and utterly fabricated stories came from Hamas sources, which are designed to fan the flames of antisemitic hate that is arguably contributing to violence against Jews in the United States,” he added.

In the early morning of June 1, a large number of Palestinians were killed with claims it happened as they were trying to approach a new aid distribution centre near the southern Gazan city of Rafah.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said its field hospital received 179 casualty cases that morning, the majority with “gunshot or shrapnel wounds”, with 21 declared dead on arrival.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said 31 people were killed and accused Israel of turning aid centres into “death traps”.

Israel’s military rejected claims it was responsible, calling the allegations “false reports”.

Third day Palestinians killed near Gaza aid site, health authorities say Photo shows Israel Palestinians The Israeli military said its forces had opened fire on a group of people who had left designated routes near the US and Israeli backed food distribution site.

The organisation which runs the aid site, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), said its activities on Sunday passed “without incident”, dismissing “false reporting about deaths, mass injuries and chaos”.

UN chief António Guterres is now calling for an “immediate and independent investigation”.

Israel does not let international news organisations into Gaza, making confirming exactly what happened more difficult.

ABC NEWS Verify has analysed statements, security footage, satellite imagery, and videos from the ground, to try and paint a clearer picture.

The path to the aid centre

At the centre of this incident is the Tel al-Sultan aid distribution centre, near Rafah, which is run by the new US-Israeli-backed GHF.

This satellite image was taken more than a week ago, but ABC NEWS Verify has seen more recent imagery which shows the layout has slightly changed.

Satellite imagery showing the Tel al-Sultan aid distribution centre on the left on May 23. (Planet Labs)

The GHF’s official Facebook page gives clues into the timing of events that morning.

On May 31, at 8:35pm, local time, the GHF posted: “Severe danger. Please do not go or remain on roads leading to the distribution site at night — there is military activity.”

On June 1, at 3:26am, it posted: “Please do not go to the distribution centers until we officially inform you that the centers are ready.”

Shortly after, at 4am, it posted a document that said the aid point at Tel al-Sultan would be the only aid point working that day, and residents from one neighbourhood could access the site from 5am.

It featured a map showing Gazans where to walk for “safe passage”.

“The safe passage to Tel Sultan will be via Al Rashid Street. The IDF will be present in the area to secure the passage. Use of the passage is prohibited before 5:00am, as the IDF has informed us that it will be active in the area before and after the specified safe hours.”

At 5:10am, another post: “Tel Sultan site is now closed.”

On the next day’s document, the warning had the following added line, and a large “STOP” sign had been placed on the route on the map.

A post on the GHF Facebook tells people to stop before Al-Alam roundabout. (Gaza Humanitarian Foundation)

“In coordination with the IDF, for your safety, movement on Al Rashid Street after the Al-Alam roundabout is prohibited until 5:00 am.”

By 5:24am, the aid site had closed.

The incident location

Witness testimony from people who were there helps to narrow down the location where the incident may have taken place.

On the approved route to the aid centre, on Al Rashid Street, there is a roundabout — sometimes referred to as Al-Alam. A source in Gaza told the ABC there is also a new mosque nearby.

This location has been referenced a number of times in reporting on the incident.

Ikram Nasser to ABC NEWS:

“By the time we arrived, there were gunfire and shots, so we hid behind the wall of Muawiyah Mosque.”

Abdulrahman Odeh to the New York Times:

“At approximately 4:30am, before he had reached the distribution point, the shooting started.”

A journalist in Rafah to BBC News:

“A crowd of Palestinians had gathered near al-Alam roundabout in Rafah, close to the GHF’s site … when Israeli tanks approached and opened fire.”

Eyewitnesses to CNN:

“Multiple eyewitnesses told CNN they were fired upon at what is known as the ‘Al-Alam’ roundabout approximately 800 meters from the site run by the GHF in southern Gaza.”

One video posted on social media on Sunday showed people lying in the sand taking cover as shots rang out.

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There aren’t enough features visible to confirm its exact location — ABC NEWS Verify spoke to the teenager who filmed it, and he confirmed it was filmed at 5am, local time, on Al Rashid Street, on the way to the aid centre, though, he couldn’t say exactly where.

A separate graphic video, which couldn’t be verified due to its lack of features, claims to show people dead on the ground on a flatter section of road. The ocean is visible at times on the right of the scene, as it would appear if heading towards the aid centre via Al Rashid Street.

The GHF said it can’t know what happened outside its centre.

“We don’t control the area outside of our distribution sites and surrounding vicinity and we have no knowledge regarding IDF activities beyond our perimeter, which is still an active war zone,” it said in a statement.

The IDF rejected allegations it was involved in the incident.

“False reports have been spread, including serious allegations against the IDF regarding fire toward Gazan residents in the area of the humanitarian aid distribution site in the Gaza Strip,” it said in a statement.

“Findings from an initial inquiry indicate that the IDF did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the humanitarian aid distribution site and that reports to this effect are false.”

But an Israeli defence source has told the ABC that approximately one kilometre away from the aid distribution site, outside of its operating hours, IDF soldiers “acted to prevent several suspects from approaching the troops”, with warning shots fired towards those people.

The source insisted there was no connection between this and the incident in question.

The GHF maintains “nothing happened at or in the vicinity of our site”.

Aid footage released

Security camera footage released by the GHF — which contained no time-stamps, metadata, or audio — appears to show what’s known as tracer rounds being shot into the air as the aid station is opened.

Tracer rounds are bullets that contain a chemical that ignites when fired to make its trajectory visible. It is often interspersed among regular rounds.

Analysing the footage, ABC NEWS Verify can show the camera’s approximate field of view — with the red lines representing the edge of the frame, and the purple dots showing light poles.

An approximate view of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s security camera. (Planet Labs)

Twice in the CCTV footage — at 2:29 and 3:10 minutes into the video — red streaks can be seen flying into the sky, in the first instance from a point off camera, and in the second, from a location in front of the trees, between the third and fourth light pole from the camera.

The streaks seen in the sky in the security footage. (Gaza Humanitarian Foundation)

ABC NEWS Verify showed a clip of the footage to two weapons experts, with both agreeing it showed tracer rounds shooting into the air.

“They’re tracers but not following the same path, which means they’re coming from two separate firing points (in the second instance),” said Mikey Kay, a former senior British military officer, and host of The Security Brief on BBC News.

“The speed tells me it’s quite high calibre weapons.”

Identifying the exact weapons used is difficult, especially without sound, but a man in the centre of the frame begins running, after previously walking, after the second tracers are seen.

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The appearance of tracer rounds implies, at a time when the aid centre was open there was shooting in the area from an unknown source.

The GHF initially told ABC NEWS Verify that the red streaks were “flares”. It stopped responding to emails when asked if they were actually tracer rounds.

The IDF said: “Hamas does everything in its power to undermine food distribution efforts in the Gaza Strip.”

In a separate incident, on Tuesday morning local time, about half a kilometre away from the aid site, the IDF said it fired shots at “individual suspects who were advancing towards the forces”.

“Casualties are being reported, details of the incident are under investigation,” it said in a statement.

At least 27 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded, according to local health authorities.

IDF releases video

At 7:54pm, local time, on June 1, as details of the incident in Rafah were being reported, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released a message and video on its official Telegram channel.

It read: “Drone footage reveals: Armed men in Gaza shoot at Gazan civilians on their way to collect humanitarian aid.”

The IDF claimed the video showed “armed and masked men throwing stones” at people trying to collect aid, in southern Khan Younis.

ABC NEWS Verify matched the start of the IDF drone vision, to an on-the-ground video posted at 3:22pm local time on June 1, from a Khan Younis neighbourhood Facebook page.

“Near Al-Tahlia in Khan Yunis [they] stole flour trucks, then started selling it by organising lines of citizens who came to buy,” the post said.

“Using violence and intimidating them with batons and some light weapons under the pretext of arranging the queues.”

The videos were matched using a post, trees, and a building which appeared in both videos.

A frame of the video released by the IDF. (IDF)

A video posted on the Hamad Residential City Facebook page. (Hamad Residential City/Facebook)

The second view matches a post seen in the IDF footage. (Hamad Residential City/Facebook)

ABC NEWS Verify contacted a resident in Khan Younis, who said the events in the video happened in the Al-Wafiye neighbourhood.

The suburb is almost 8 kilometres away from Rafah.

The IDF video was released on Telegram with the caption implying who was responsible.

“Hamas is a murderous and brutal terrorist organization that is starving the residents of Gaza,” the caption read.

At least one figure in the video appears to be holding a rifle. And what looks like a shot is fired into the ground at one point. A second figure appears to be throwing dirt at another.

These moments in the video are cropped, so it is not clear if they happened at the same location and time as the other drone footage in the video.

The footage isn’t high quality enough to tell if the figures are wearing Hamas uniforms.

CNN —

It was around 5:30 in the morning on Thursday in Washington, DC, when senior US officials first got word — and photographs — from their Israeli counterparts: Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar might be dead.

For more than a year since Hamas attacked Israel last October 7, Israeli forces — with some quiet help from the United States — had been hunting the mastermind behind that day.

More than once, they had been close, pushing the Hamas chief from one underground hiding place to the next. But Sinwar had moved like a ghost in the endless warren of tunnels dug beneath the streets of Gaza, rarely coming above ground and communicating only through courier to avoid detection by electronic surveillance.

In the end, it was only by pure accident that a group of Israeli soldiers stumbled on Israel’s most wanted man.

Infantry soldiers from the IDF’s Bislamach Brigade, a unit that normally trains future commanders, had been tracking several men among the ruins in southern Gaza, pulverized by Israel’s punishing bombing campaign. Gunfire broke out. The Israelis fired back from a tank and sent a drone swooping into one of the hollowed-out buildings.

It was only after the exchange of fire had ended and troops returned the following morning to inspect the rubble that they realized one of the bodies was Sinwar.

His death marks the end of a yearlong manhunt that had consumed Israeli and US intelligence services — and dominated discussions about what it would take to end the war. The CIA had set up a specific task force to track Sinwar; and after October 7, the US broadly surged intelligence assets to the region to gather information on Hamas and its leader.

Yet, multiple US officials told CNN, the moment of his death came as a total surprise.

Israeli and US officials often had some sense of the general area where Sinwar was hiding over the long months. But the elusive Hamas leader moved constantly and made pinpointing his location extremely difficult.

He eschewed cell phones and other electronic communications entirely, instead sending written notes to convey his directions both to military commanders inside Gaza and to Hamas officials in Doha who were acting as his representatives in negotiations over a possible ceasefire. Interlocutors would sometimes have to wait days or weeks for feedback from Sinwar to give couriers time to relay written messages back and forth.

Sinwar had not appeared publicly since October 7. His only known direct communication with the outside world was through several letters, most recently last month when he wrote to Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. The Lebanese militant group said he had written to Nasrallah reaffirming his commitment to fighting Israel and supporting the Iran-backed alliance of regional militants known as the “Axis of Resistance.”

For so long, Sinwar had been known to be meticulously careful, even paranoid, about his personal security. It’s unclear what drew him above ground on Wednesday — a fateful decision that made him vulnerable.

“These guys come out of hiding and can never stay comfortable,” one US official said.

A year of near misses

Over and over, it seemed that the IDF was always just a step behind Sinwar.

On at least three separate occasions in 2024, Israel Defense Forces were able to push into tunnels where Sinwar had only just been.

In January, according to a top IDF commander, DNA evidence helped Israel confirm that he had been hiding in a tunnel beneath Khan Younis in early October 2023. CNN was unable to independently confirm that analysis.

Palestinian civilians and rescuers help clear the rubble in the heavily bombarded city center of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip following overnight Israeli shelling, on October 10, 2023. Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images

International media have been blocked from accessing Gaza independently since the war started. The only way in is with an Israeli military escort, which means reporters are only allowed to see what Israel wants them to see.

In February, CCTV camera footage purportedly showed Sinwar inside a tunnel in the same area just days after the October 7 attack, moving through a dim tunnel with his wife, children and his brother Ibrahim Sinwar.

As the IDF began closing in on Khan Younis, the city of his birth, Sinwar appeared to have moved south. The IDF said this week that they found his DNA in a tunnel in Rafah, a few hundred meters from where six hostages were killed in August.

He was killed on Wednesday not far from that tunnel, in a part of Rafah called Tal Al Sultan that had been squared off by the Israeli military after intensified attacks by two Hamas battalions all summer.

US intelligence collection was effective enough that officials had some windows into Sinwar’s mindset over the long months.

At one point over the summer, the CIA has assessed that Sinwar, facing blame for the enormity of the suffering in Gaza, was under pressure from his own military commanders to accept a ceasefire deal and end the war with Israel.

As Israel hunted for Hamas operatives hiding in the vast network of underground tunnels, the IDF at times sent in dogs, ferrets and robots rather than soldiers.

Sometimes, when a dog would not return back above ground, the IDF wondered whether it was because of a lack of oxygen in some parts of the tunnel that were multiple stories below ground level. At other times, the robots would get shot at – confirming that there was, in fact, Hamas presence.

But he remained frustratingly beyond reach.

It seems clear that the IDF did not know he was near Tal Al Sultan until after he was killed; In mid-September, the IDF took CNN and other media to the area. At that time, the IDF gave no indication that Sinwar could be there — and it’s unlikely it would have taken reporters to a location where it believed him to be hiding.

DNA and dental records

On Thursday morning, top Israeli and American officials stayed in close contact as the IDF worked to confirm with certainty that the body found in the rubble in northern Rafah was, in fact, Sinwar.

But even before that official confirmation would come some hours later, pictures of Sinwar’s body had senior US officials feeling confident that the mastermind of the October 7 attacks had finally been killed.

By midday in Washington, Israel had used DNA and dental records to confirm the identity of the body, holdings in Israel’s possession because of Sinwar’s time in an Israeli prison.

In his final fight, Sinwar, along with two other men, threw grenades and fired weapons at the surrounding Israeli soldiers, who responded with their own gunfire. Sinwar, armed with a vest and a gun and $10,000 in Israeli shekels, fled alone to another building.

In the moments before his death — which Israeli officials have said was caused by a bullet to the head — Israeli troops flew a drone into the heavily damaged building where he had fled. A video from the drone, released by the Israeli military, offers a silent account of his final moments. It hovers in an upstairs room, where a masked figure sits alone in a chair, surrounded by dust and rubble. The figure holds a piece of wood in his hand, and, a split-second before the video ends, hurls it at the drone.

This still image from video provided by the Israel Defense Forces shows a damaged building where a person – who the IDF says is Sinwar – is seen. The man’s face is obscured and he is seen sitting alone in Rafah, Gaza Strip, on Wednesday, October 16. Israel Defense Forces

Already, Iran has praised Sinwar as a martyr who died fighting, face-to-face with his enemy.

Over the past several months, American officials came to believe Sinwar had grown increasingly hardened — both in his determination to continue fighting Israel in Gaza but also in his own fatalistic outlook.

Sinwar did not expect he would survive the war, one US official said. Because he believed he would eventually be killed, he had little motivation to agree to a ceasefire, US officials assessed — leaving talks in a perpetual deadlock.

Instead of seeking peace in Gaza, American officials suspected Sinwar wanted the conflict to continue without an endpoint, bogging down Israel and damaging its international reputation.

To the end, US intelligence officials believed that Sinwar was unconcerned with his own mortality, and determined to continue the fight.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the Bislamach Brigade.