In videos posted on social media, a group of people can be seen removing bags from a truck and throwing them onto the road, while further ahead gunfire can be heard cutting off the vehicle’s passage.

According to the newspaper The Times of Israel, the incident took place near the Israeli settlement of Beit El, in the occupied West Bank.

This is the sixth incident of this type this week. On Monday, a group of protesters blocked and vandalized a humanitarian convoy near the Palestinian city of Hebron.

The protesters were part of a group of right-wing reservists known as Tzav 9, which has previously been involved in similar episodes.

This news comes during an offensive by the Israeli army in the city of Rafah, in the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip, which has forced the closure of the border crossing into Egypt and further restricted the flow of humanitarian aid into the Palestinian enclave, which has been devastated by more than seven months of war.

The UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) estimates that some 360,000 people have left Rafah since the first Israeli evacuation order on Monday, while the artillery advances further into the city, where 1.4 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip had taken refuge, most of whom were displaced from other areas of the tiny territory.

On 7 October of last year, Israel declared war on the Gaza Strip in order to “eradicate” the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas after it carried out an unprecedented attack on Israeli territory hours earlier, killing more than 1,170 people, most of whom were civilians.

The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) – in power in Gaza since 2007 and classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States, the European Union and Israel – has also taken more than 250 hostages, 128 of whom remain in captivity and 36 have died in the meantime, according to the latest figures from the Israeli army.

The war, which today entered its 222nd day and continues to threaten to spread throughout the Middle East, has so far caused at least 35,233 deaths, 79,141 injuries and around 10,000 people missing, presumed buried in the rubble, most of whom were civilians, according to updated figures from the local authorities.

The conflict has also caused almost two million displaced people, plunging the overcrowded and impoverished Palestinian enclave into a serious humanitarian crisis, with more than 1.1 million people in a “catastrophic hunger situation” that is claiming victims – “the highest number ever recorded” by the UN in studies on food security in the world.

See also: Netanyahu rejects “humanitarian catastrophe” in Rafah (Portuguese version)