Israel Blames Misidentification for Strike That Killed Gaza Aid Workers
The body of a World Central Kitchen worker was being transported in Gaza on Wednesday. MOHAMMED SALEM/REUTERS
By Sune Engel Rasmussen and Stephen Kalin
The Israeli military said an initial investigation into a strike that killed seven aid workers in Gaza found its forces had wrongly identified their vehicles as hostile targets, as Israel responds to international condemnation and tries to contain the fallout from a hunger crisis in the enclave.
The Monday-night strike that hit workers with World Central Kitchen—an aid groupfounded by celebrity chef José Andrés, and one of the most important providers of food assistance in the Gaza Strip—came amid rising international concerns about Israel’s conduct in the nearly six-month war against Hamas.
Andrés said the three World Central Kitchen vehicles—two armored cars and a third unarmored one—were targeted in multiple strikes. When the first car was hit, occupants escaped to one of the other vehicles which advanced down the road, he told Reuters on Wednesday. When the second vehicle was attacked, they fled to the third vehicle before it was also struck a short distance away, he said.
“We were targeted deliberately, nonstop until everybody was dead in this convoy,” Andrés said. “This was not just a bad luck situation where, ‘Oops, we dropped the bomb in the wrong place.’ ”
The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said in a recorded message released early Wednesday that the initial findings of a probe into the incident indicated that the strike hadn’t been intended to harm World Central Kitchen workers.
“It was a mistake that followed a misidentification—at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened,” he said. He didn’t specify what the military thought it was targeting and said he expected a fuller account within several days.
Investigative group Bellingcat identified the damaged World Central Kitchen vehicles spread out over a stretch spanning about a mile and a half and geolocated two of them on a road identified by the United Nations as accessible for humanitarian aid, with the third in a field just off that road.
Bellingcat also said the small impact holes in the roofs of the vehicles and other damage pointed to the use of precision munition similar to a type used by Israel in southern Lebanon. To hit moving targets with such munitions, the group said, it is necessary to track the target in real time, with laser guidance involving a drone, for example. According to Bellingcat, all three World Central Kitchen vehicles were white, and at least one had the organization’s logo clearly marked on its roof, which it said could have been visible depending on the optical system used to track the vehicle.
However, Wes Bryant, a retired senior targeting professional in the U.S. Air Force who ran drone units in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, said that logos on cars could have been hard to read from above at night, depending on the quality of the camera used. Striking a target on a commonly used aid-distribution route, he said, was an example of “gross targeting negligence” by the Israeli military.
“It should’ve been a completely no-strike area, except in cases of a highly valuable target,” Bryant said.
The strikes happened around 11 p.m., after nightfall, according to World Central Kitchen. A spokeswoman for the aid group said Wednesday that the vehicles were moving late at night because several of its workers were held up for hours by the Israeli military at a checkpoint by the jetty that the organization has built out of rubble to receive aid coming into Gaza.
Strike on World Central Kitchen Convoy. Source: Bellingcat
When the Israelis allowed the aid workers to enter the jetty, they proceeded to a warehouse in Deir al-Balah to store the aid, before proceeding south toward their accommodations in Rafah, the group said.
World Central Kitchen said that its security guards escorting the targeted vehicles were unarmed and that the organization has a no-arms policy on all its convoys.
Based on the apparent complexity of Monday’s strike, it likely involved multiple drones and two to three dozen operators and support staff, a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official said.
“The team either ignored their own protocols or, over the course of the war, prewar protocols had been dropped nearly entirely,” said the former official, referring to the military’s rules of engagement that define how and when force can be used.
The fallout from the strike—which resulted in the first known deaths of foreign aid workers in Gaza since the start of the war—has piled pressure on Israel to protect people caught up in the fighting.
It also threatens to further hamper the flow of aid into Gaza, which is suffering from one of the world’s worst hunger crises as a result of Israel’s siege on the enclave. World Central Kitchen and several other aid groups paused their work in Gaza out of fear for their staffs’ safety following Monday’s strike.
World Central Kitchen was the largest non-U.N. agency delivering food aid to the strip, able to supply around 300,000 meals a day. The charity said that it was currently focused on trying to get the bodies of its killed staff members out of Gaza and to their families, and had yet to begin considering resuming aid delivery. The organization’s efforts to deliver aid to Gaza in coordination with the United Arab Emirates via a maritime corridor, which launched in early March, have also been suspended for now.
American Near East Refugee Aid, a U.S. relief organization that has operated in the occupied Palestinian territories for more than five decades and had worked with World Central Kitchen to serve some two million meals a week in Gaza, suspended its operations in the enclave Tuesday and doesn’t have a timeline for when it might resume.
Sean Carroll, Anera’s president, said that Israel previously had broken assurances of safety for humanitarian activities and that more verbal assurances alone wouldn’t be enough for the aid group to restart its work.
The U.S., which is building a temporary floating pier off the coast of Gaza for aid deliveries, still needs weeks to finish the project. The strike on aid workers has raised concerns within the American military about security around the pier, U.S. officials said. The U.S. military is planning simulations later this week that have been expanded since Monday’s strike to include more examination around security for distribution, U.S. officials familiar with the matter said.
The two main food providers in Gaza are two U.N. bodies: its agency for Palestinian refugees, known as Unrwa, and the World Food Program. Each has the capacity to bring in food for around 1.1 million people on a regular basis.
But the food getting into Gaza isn’t enough to meet the needs of the roughly 2.2 million people who live there, with more than a million estimated to be starving. The situation is especially dire in the northern part of the enclave, which has been mostly cut off from humanitarian deliveries since the beginning of the war. Only a trickle of food has reached the north in recent weeks, mostly provided by the WFP. Israel, which tightly controls access to the north of the strip, denies most requests for humanitarian missions there.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday said the hit on the aid convoy had been unintentional, and that “it happens during war.” Andrés, the founder of World Central Kitchen, took issue with that characterization.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu has said, ‘This happens in wartime.’ But the air strikes on our convoy were not just some unfortunate mistake in the fog of war. It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the IDF,” Andrés wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times. He said the probe into the deaths of workers from his organization “needs to start at the top.”
Throughout the conflict, aid groups working in Gaza have sought security guarantees from all parties to the conflict, including Hamas. They have shared the location of their operations and coordinated all their movements with Cogat, the Israeli military body coordinating aid in the strip, to avoid being mistakenly caught in the fighting. World Central Kitchen said it had shared the details of its Monday mission with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which in turn coordinates with Cogat.
Despite efforts at coordination, humanitarian buildings and convoys have been hit repeatedly in Gaza. While the deaths of the World Central Kitchen workers have attracted global attention, they aren’t an isolated incident. Since October, at least 196 humanitarian workers have been killed in the Palestinian territories, according to the U.N.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Tuesday said the Israeli military would set up direct coordination with international aid organizations, effectively cutting out Cogat.
President Biden said Tuesday night that he was “outraged and heartbroken” by the deaths of the aid workers, including one U.S.-Canadian dual citizen. Biden said an Israeli probe into the deaths must be done quickly and made public, and that Israel hadn’t done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver needed help to civilians.
U.S. officials said that Biden and Netanyahu are scheduled to speak Thursday and are expected to talk about the war in Gaza and the strike on the World Central Kitchen workers.
The seven victims of Monday’s strike also include a Palestinian, three Britons, a Pole and an Australian citizen. The three British victims were all veterans of the British armed forces and were working as security advisers for the convoy.
-Margherita Stancati, Anat Peled, David Luhnow and Dov Lieber contributed to this article.
