Attacks on humanitarian workers
The Biden administration has decried the ever-mounting civilian and humanitarian deaths in Gaza, where the Hamas-run health ministry says a stunning 32,000 people have been killed. Israel blames Hamas for the death toll, saying that it operates and hides in civilian areas.
Monday’s tragedy follows months of prior Israeli attacks on humanitarian workers and shows how the U.S. has failed to persuade Israel to ensure the safety of civilians and aid workers, experts said. Over 200 aid workers, the vast majority of them Palestinians, have been killed in Israeli airstrikes and gunfire since the war started with Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, U.S. officials say.
Israeli forces have fired on or bombed approved aid convoys, shelters located in designated safe zones, hospitals and an American aid group’s staff residence.
The only surprise, Konyndyk said, was that Westerners weren’t killed sooner. “Humanitarians have been screaming about this for six months,” he said of the unsafe conditions for aid workers. “It was only a matter of time − and time ran out.”
None of these deaths, though, inspired anything like the Israeli and U.S. government response to the deaths of the World Central Kitchen workers.
“You’ve got humanitarian workers being killed, and they worked for an organization run by a very high-profile person,” Konyndyk said. “They finally found a victim they couldn’t blame.”
World Central Kitchen said its workers, traveling in three vehicles – two of them clearly marked with the group’s logo – were targeted as they left a warehouse in the central Gaza city of Deir alBalah after dropping off food that had recently arrived from Cyprus.
Andrés told Reuters the attack wasn’t merely a “bad luck situation where, ‘oops,’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong place.”
“Even if we were not in coordination with the IDF, no democratic country and no military can be targeting civilians and humanitarians,” he said.
“It was a series of three attacks in