Robert Holloway, an AFP reporter who witnessed the white truck driving at speed onto the seaside road, described scenes of “absolute chaos”.
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Bastille Day is the biggest public holiday in France.
“We support our friends and partners in France and we join with others around the world in hoping that this will be the end of this type of horrific incident that is targeted at unarmed civilians”, she said. “I had to protect my face from flying debris”, he said.
“The mass killing in Nice is a thriller that came true”.
The hospital, equipped with one of France’s largest pediadiatric emergency units, also called the families of children it was already treating before the attack to ask them to pick up their children to free up rooms for the attack victims.
At least 84 people have been killed in a lorry attack on a Bastille Day celebration in Nice.
Mr Estrosi said the truck was loaded with arms and grenades.
“Investigations are now under way to establish if the individual acted alone or if he had accomplices who might have fled”, the interior ministry spokesman said.
Valls and French President Francois Hollande were going to Nice later Friday.
The UAE is part of the USA -led coalition targeting the Islamic State group and hosts American and Western military personnel involved in the fight.
Clinton said that “every American stands in strong solidarity with the people of France, and we say with one voice: We will not be intimidated”.
It was not immediately clear who would have been behind an attack, but France has recently seen a spate of dramatic assaults from by jihadist groups, including the Islamic State group which straddles Iraq and Syria.
Police officers stand near a van, with its windscreen riddled with bullets, that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice.
“We see this truck along the boardwalk, just ploughing through people, bodies getting hit and people running in all directions”, Tony Molina, who viewed it all from his apartment, told CNN.
A concert by popstar Rihanna due Friday was cancelled in the wake of the attack, as well as the Nice Jazz festival.
“There was a lot of screams coming from ahead of us where the truck was”. Residents of the Mediterranean city, which is close to the Italian border, were advised to stay indoors.
France has lived with soldiers in the streets since the November attacks, and much of the country was under intense security during the month-long European football championships, which ended July 10 without incident.
Nice regional President Eric Ciotti said on France Info radio that “it’s a scene of horror”, and gave a figure of 60 dead.
“An attack on the terrorist nature can not be denied”, he was quoted as saying.
“The subjects of the attack were people celebrating liberty, equality and fraternity”.
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The tournament brought an all-too-brief burst of joy to a gloomy France, bogged down after the two attacks in 2015, violent anti-government protests, strikes and floods.
