The masked and armed security contractor atop a dirt mound watches thousands of Palestinians who have been kettled into narrow lanes separated by fences below.He makes a heart shape with his hands and the crowd responds - the fence begins to bend as they push against it.

The embattled Israeli-backed aid group that began operating in Gaza earlier this week is not screening Palestinians at aid distribution sites, despite Israeli officials saying that additional security measures were a core reason for the creation of the new program.

Israel is blocking all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said, with almost no ready-to-eat food entering what its spokesperson described as "the hungriest place on earth".

Hijazi described what he called 15 minutes of terror Thursday at the center run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the private contractor that Israel says will replace the U.N. in feeding Gaza’s more than 2 million people.

Chaos erupted again as tens of thousands of desperate Palestinians tried to collect food from distribution sites in the Gaza Strip run by a new U.S.- and Israeli-backed foundation. Multiple

Hunger is so widespread among Gaza’s 2.1mn people and food so scarce that humanitarian agencies are concerned the chaos may deepen, especially as the new Israel-backed Gaza Huma