Officers demoted for role in deaths of aid workers

JERUSALEM — The Israeli military announced Friday that two officers had been removed from their posts and three senior commanders reprimanded for their role in the drone strikes that killed seven aid workers in the Gaza Strip this week.

In line with military protocol, the army’s findings will also be sent to military prosecutors for them to assess over the coming weeks whether anyone should face criminal charges for their role in the attacks Monday. In the meantime, the military is assessing whether to move the two officers — a reserve colonel and a major — who were stripped of their posts to other roles or to fire them from the military.

A military spokesperson, Peter Lerner, said the decision showed the army’s “humility to acknowledge errors, the courage to make amends, and the resolve to learn from them.”

But rights activists said they did not expect any further accountability because the military prosecution system has historically been slow to charge, let alone convict, soldiers accused of crimes.

In the five years between 2017 and 2021, the military prosecution system was made aware of 1,260 instances in which Israeli soldiers were accused of crimes against Palestinians, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group that cited military statistics procured through a freedom of information request. The group said about one-fifth resulted in investigations, but only 11 in criminal indictments, fewer than 1% of the total.

No soldier has been charged in the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist who the Israeli army acknowledged was highly likely to have been accidentally killed in May 2022 by an Israeli soldier. An investigation by The New York Times concluded she was hit by a bullet fired from the approximate location of an Israeli military jeep.

In another high-profile case, an Israeli soldier who was jailed after fatally shooting a Palestinian assailant, who was already severely wounded and lying on the ground, was released in 2018 after serving just nine months of an 18-month prison sentence for manslaughter.

A military investigation “virtually never leads to actual criminal accountability, and in the extremely rare cases where it does, it leads to extremely lenient punishment,” said Sarit Michaeli, a spokesperson for B’Tselem, another Israeli rights group that has analyzed the Israeli military justice system.

Even if that happens in this case, “the real questions are not going to be asked,” Michaeli said.

The people killed in the drone strikes worked for World Central Kitchen, a charity that has been providing food to people in Gaza, where famine looms.

They were traveling in three vehicles marked with the emblem and name of the group, which said it had coordinated its movements with Israeli authorities specifically to avoid such an attack.

The military said the soldiers who authorized the strikes mistakenly believed the aid workers were traveling with an armed militant.