Israel must explain accident

On Monday, seven humanitarian workers with World Central Kitchen lost their lives in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza amid the war that Hamas began with its Oct. 7 onslaught of murder, rape and kidnapping.

Israel and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu must explain how this airstrike happened, and guarantee that avoiding civilian deaths will be a priority in weighing military actions.

War is hell, and war is to some extent chaos. It is not possible to fight a war with a 100 percent certainty that no errors will be committed in the fog of conflict. Yet that doesn’t mean accepting an all-or-nothing approach— that either a military maintains a perfect record of avoiding collateral damage, an all-but-impossible standard, or it is free to let loose without much care for the people caught in the crossfire.

There is a wide gulf in between, and moral armed forces, as the Israel Defense Forces hold themselves to be, are expected to hew as closely as they can to the minimization of wanton destruction.

The distressingly high level of civilian Palestinian casualties is due to Hamas’ diabolical embedding of their terrorist fighters among the populace. The intention is to make Israel’s war-fighting very difficult. And that is the challenge the IDF must meet: to attack and destroy Hamas while sparing the bystanders, a challenge it is not always meeting.

Biden, a longtime supporter of Israel, is in agreement, saying flatly that “this is not a stand-alone incident,” and that the killing of aid workers “is a major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult … Israel has also not done enough to protect civilians.”

It is incumbent on Israel to find the cause and have some accountability for the personnel at fault here for hitting an aid convoy. While correct that the cause of the whole war lays with Hamas’ aggression, that cannot be a shield against the grave responsibilities that come with being a modern and very well-equipped military operating in a civilian-dense area.