ABOUT WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN

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% 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. …

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.”

The IDF’s contention that this was an error borne out of misidentification and miscommunication is troubling as World Central Kitchen has been successfully sharing their coordinates directly with the military for weeks to avoid being targeted. … For the aid to flow once more, aid groups have to trust that their people will be reasonably safer. … Only a full accounting of this tragedy and the implementation of safeguards against another will rebuild this trust.