Israel says strike that killed aid workers was a mistake, groups say it was no anomaly
CAIRO — Two basic mistakes, according to the Israeli military. First, officers overlooked a message detailing the vehicles in the convoy. Second, a spotter saw someone boarding one car, carrying something — possibly a bag — that he thought was a weapon. Officials say the result was the series of Israeli drone strikes that killed seven aid workers on a dark Gaza road.
The Israeli military has described the deadly strike on the World Central Kitchen convoy as a tragic error. Its explanation raises the question: If that’s the case, how often has Israel made such mistakes in its sixmonth-old offensive in Gaza?
Rights groups and aid workers say Monday night’s mistake was hardly an anomaly. They say the wider problem is not violations of the military’s rules of engagement but the rules themselves.
In Israel’s drive to destroy Hamas, the rights groups and aid workers say, the military seems to have given itself wide leeway to determine what is a target and how many civilian deaths it allows as “collateral damage.”
Israel says it is targeting Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that it tries to minimize civilian deaths. It blames the large number of civilian casualties on militants and says it’s because they operate among the population. Israel says each strike goes through an assessment by legal experts, but it has not made its rules of engagement public.
In the thousands of strikes Israel has carried out, as well as shelling and shootings in ground operations, it’s impossible to know how many times a target has been wrongly identified. Nearly every day, strikes level buildings with Palestinian families inside, killing men, women and children.
Sarit Michaeli, spokeswoman for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, said the World Central Kitchen strike drew world attention only because foreigners were killed.
“The thought that this is a unique case, that it’s a rare example — it’s an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has been following the situation,” she said.
She said a broader investigation is needed into the rules of engagement: “The relevant questions aren’t asked because the investigations only deal with specific cases, rather than the broader policy.”
Israel’s chief military spokesman, Daniel Hagari, acknowledged, “Mistakes were conducted in the last six months.”
“We do everything we can not to harm innocent civilians,” he told reporters. “It is hard because Hamas is going with civilian clothes … Is it a problem, is it complexity for us? Yes. Does that matter? No. We need to do more and more.”
But the military hasn’t specified how it will achieve this.
Brig. Gen. Benny Gal, who was part of the investigation into the World Central Kitchen strikes, was asked whether more questions should be asked before a strike is authorized.
“This was not our standards,” he said. “The standard is more questions, more details, more crossing sources. And this was not the case.”
Palestinian witnesses have repeatedly reported people, including women and children, being shot and killed or wounded by Israeli troops while carrying white flags. In March, the military acknowledged it shot dead two Palestinians and wounded a third while walking on a Gaza beach. It said troops opened fire after the men allegedly ignored warning shots. It reacted after the news channel Al Jazeera showed footage of one of the men falling to the ground while walking in an open area and then a bulldozer pushing two bodies into the garbage-strewn sand. It said at least two of the three men were waving white flags.
Some Israeli politicians and news outlets regularly proclaim there are no innocents in Gaza. And in some videos circulated online, soldiers talk of getting vengeance for the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that sparked the war.
In that atmosphere, Palestinians and other critics say, soldiers on the ground appear to have wide liberty in deciding whether to target someone as suspicious. Residents and medical staff in Gaza say they see the result.
Chris Cobb-Smith, a former British army and weapons expert who has done research and security missions in Gaza, said that if there was a breakdown in communication in the case of the World Central Kitchen strike, “for a professional army, this is inexcusable.”