AT LEAST 59 Palestinians were killed and more than 200 wounded in Gaza while waiting for desperately needed aid, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry and a local hospital.

Eyewitnesses said that Israeli forces struck a nearby home and then opened fire on crowds gathered around UN and commercial aid trucks in the southern city of Khan Younis on Tuesday evening.

Yousef Nofal said: “It was a massacre,” saying that the soldiers continued firing on people as they fled from the area.

The Israeli military confirmed “several casualties” and said an investigation was under way.

The UN’s humanitarian body, OCHA, said the crowd had been waiting for food rations delivered by UN convoys.

The incident comes amid growing concern over the militarisation and privatisation of humanitarian aid delivery.

The UN and major relief organisations have warned that aid is increasingly being controlled or delivered by private firms led by former US intelligence officers and military veterans, with little transparency or regard for humanitarian principles.

Last week, US contractor Fogbow dropped food parcels over a town in South Sudan that had already been emptied by conflict.

Humanitarian groups warn that this trend threatens to turn life-saving aid into a tool for political and military objectives, including controlling civilian populations and influencing the course of war.

Oxfam America director Scott Paul said: “What we've learned over the years of successes and failures is there’s a difference between a logistics operation and a security operation, and a humanitarian operation.”

“‘Truck and chuck’ doesn’t help people. It puts people at risk.”

Norwegian Refugee Council executive director Jan Egeland said that when one side in a conflict decides where and how aid is handed out, and who gets it, “it will always result in some communities getting preferential treatment.”

He said that the tactic can serve strategic aims, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to push civilians further south in Gaza.

Mr Egeland warned that the presence of armed soldiers and security contractors at aid sites can make them too intimidating for vulnerable people to approach.

He said: “Why does the US now support what it has resisted in every other war zone for two generations?”

UN adviser Mark Millar said that private military contractors “have even less sympathy for a humanitarian perspective that complicates their business-driven model,” he said.

“And once let loose, they seem to be even less accountable.”