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ISRAEL PAYS A POLITICAL PRICE FOR KILLING AID WORKERS – WHEN
THEY’RE NOT PALESTINIANS  
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Amira Hass
April 3, 2024
Haaretz
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_ The attack that killed seven volunteers from World Central Kitchen
is Israel's latest assault on the humanitarian aid system in Gaza.
This time most of the dead are Westerners, so Israel will have a hard
time playing the strike down. _

Children in Gaza gathering around a vehicle in the World Central
Kitchen convoy struck by Israel late Monday. (Credit: Agence
France-Presse (AFP) // Haaretz),

 

Somewhere in the Israel Defense Forces' chain of command, a decision
was made to attack an international aid convoy based on a suspicion
that at some point an armed man had traveled in that convoy. In the
attack, missiles fired from an air force drone killed seven aid
workers from the group World Central Kitchen.

It's hard to overstate the gravity of the decision to open fire and
the headache the drone operators have caused the IDF and Israel's PR
efforts. This headache wouldn't have happened if the seven dead had
been Palestinians, not Westerners, as six of them were.

After all, Israel has repeatedly claimed that Hamas
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behind civilians, so if the victims are Palestinians, it can say Hamas
was responsible. Normally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
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have rushed to express regret at the "tragic case of our forces
unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip
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A girl carrying a bag of food from World Central Kitchen in Rafah in
southern Gaza last month.  (Credit: Mohammed Abed/Agence
France-Presse (AFP)  //  Haaretz)
Israel's PR efforts can't justify the attack or obscure the
repercussions – not only because of the identity of the people
killed, but also because of World Central Kitchen
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importance in the process Israel has been advancing for months:
hindering the work of UNRWA
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the point of eradicating the refugee agency. And this is happening as
malnutrition and starvation ravage Gaza – especially in the north
– and as the International Court of Justice
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Israel to ensure Gazans access to humanitarian aid.

World Central Kitchen has been the main player getting aid into
northern Gaza by sea. This is the route the United States has promoted
for the north since Israel rejected requests from the aid groups to
open the short, fast and inexpensive land route through the northern
border crossings, sparing the long and dangerous trip from the Rafah
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Kerem Shalom crossings in the south.

World Central Kitchen's first, experimental shipment of aid by sea,
funded by the United Arab Emirates, arrived in Gaza at the beginning
of March. The second shipment, also funded by the Emirates, arrived
near the Gaza City shore only this past Monday. But of the 400 tons of
food and equipment for 1 million meals, only 100 tons were unloaded
from the ships. Now, because of the attack and the organization's
decision to suspend its operations in Gaza, the ships are returning
full to Cyprus.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian aid via the southern crossings remains
below the required minimum, 500 truckloads daily. The daily average in
March was only 159 trucks, as reported by the United Nations. The
highest number came on March 28 – 264 trucks. The trucks have to
wait many days for their turn in the Israeli security inspections.

 
Humanitarian aid transported by World Central Kitchen arriving in
Gaza last month.  (Credit: IDF via AP  //  Haaretz)
And then only a small part of the cargo gets to northern Gaza because
of the complex coordination with the IDF, the delays at the army's
internal checkpoints, IDF fire and the dangers of raids by gangs. As
long as World Central Kitchen's maritime route seemed safe, it was
possible to downplay aid organizations' difficulties in reaching
northern Gaza. The killing of the valiant workers from the group
therefore damages Israel's efforts to appear it's carrying out the
instructions of the International Court of Justice.

Even before the maritime pilot program in March, World Central
Kitchen, which the Palestinians were unfamiliar with before the war,
raised its profile. Since October, it has provided more than 35
million hot meals and established more than 60 community kitchens.
People noticed that its kitchens had cooking gas, which other
organizations didn't have, and that it offered fresh vegetables
otherwise unavailable in markets, or only at exorbitant prices.

According to a source at an aid group, nearly overnight World Central
Kitchen achieved an operation second in size only to UNRWA, which has
been around since 1949. The swiftness of the launch suggests that the
Israeli bureaucracy eased the process. That is, the drone operators
struck an organization whose presence and work were important to
Israel not only for humanitarian reasons but also politically: the aim
to wipe UNRWA off the map.

Like every aid group in Gaza during the war, World Central Kitchen
coordinated with the army. As with the other organizations, the IDF
knows the location of each of its installations, its vehicles are
marked with flags and tags, and its workers wear protective vests
declaring who they are. The identity of each worker is known to the
military authorities, who vet every volunteer. The route taken by
every vehicle and convoy requires authorization by Israel. In the
jargon of the army and aid groups, this process is called
"deconfliction."

At the beginning of December, Israel announced the establishment of
the deconfliction mechanism for protecting aid workers and civilians,
in the wake of a demand by David Satterfield, President Joe Biden
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special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues. Representatives of
aid groups report to liaison people at Israel's Coordinator of
Government Activities in the Territories, who coordinate with the
military forces on the ground.

This wasn't the first incident during this war in which the IDF
attacked vehicles and installations of international or local aid
organizations; the UN believes that about 196 aid workers have been
killed since the start of the war. Six Palestinians affiliated with
Doctors Without Borders – aid workers and members of their families,
among them two doctors and a little girl – have been killed by IDF
fire, which has also damaged vehicles belonging to the organization.
Palestinians who were inside a building of the British group Medical
Aid for Palestinians were wounded. Fifteen Red Crescent paramedics
were killed by Israeli fire as they were on their way to wounded
people.

 
Gazans crowding around trucks carrying food aid in February.
 (Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit  //  Haaretz)
At least 16 times, Israel has fired at trucks bringing in food and at
people crowding around them, whether because the men guarding the
trucks were tagged as Hamas people or the soldiers in a tank felt
their safety was threatened. That was the case when a tank crew fired
on the masses surrounding a food convoy on February 29 – about 100
people were killed, some crushed to death by the frightened crowd,
others by gunfire from the tank.

Most of these incidents were met by silence in the Israeli media, and
the IDF didn't apologize or admit a mistake. This is because the dead,
the wounded and the unhurt but traumatized were Palestinians, and
because UNRWA and the Red Crescent are automatically labeled
collaborators with Hamas.

The killing of the World Central Kitchen volunteers, an attack that's
not the first of its kind, brings to the surface three basic elements
in the IDF's operations in Gaza. The first is the lack of coordination
among the various forces, despite declarations to the contrary. The
second is the relatively low rank that has authority to kill from the
air. The third is the IDF's great flexibility in what it considers
collateral damage: the very large number of unarmed people, among them
children, whom it's "permissible" to kill in order to hit "one
legitimate target."

In the incident late Monday, the suspicion was that one "armed
individual" (whose identity we still don't know) was present. This was
enough to allow the IDF drone operators to kill seven people who
weren't suspects or armed. This ease of opening fire is one of the
explanations for the 14,000 children killed by Israel in Gaza so far,
a figure provided by UNICEF.

[AMIRA HASS [[link removed]] is a reporter
and columnist for Ha’aretz Daily, a newspaper based in Tel Aviv,
Israel. She has been a journalist for two decades.

Hass has written critically about both Israeli and Palestinian
authorities. She has not allowed her gender, ethnicity or nationality
– all hindrances in the region she reports from – to obstruct her
from pursuing the truth in her reporting.

In 1989, Hass quit her studies in history at Tel Aviv University and
began working as a copy editor for Ha’aretz Daily. At the same time,
she volunteered for Workers Hotline, a human rights group dedicated to
reaching out to vulnerable workers, many of whom were Palestinian. She
became acquainted with life in Gaza and grew frustrated about how
poorly Israel’s occupation of Gaza was represented in the Israeli
press.

By 1991, Hass was writing weekly features for Ha’aretz Daily, and in
1993, she became a full-time writer for the paper. She moved to Gaza,
which at the time was under direct and full Israeli occupation.

Hass, now based in Ramallah, has lived in the Occupied Palestinian
territories for nearly 30 years. She has been reporting on the life of
Palestinians under the Israeli occupation and covering the major armed
clashes and Israeli military attacks. Her goal has been to provide her
readers with detailed information about Israeli policies, especially
restrictions on the freedom of movement.

In the course of her work, Hass has been threatened, harassed and
detained. In May 2009, she was detained by Israeli police on her
return from a four-month stay in Gaza “for violating a military
order” (which forbids entry into Gaza) and “for staying illegally
in an enemy state.” She had also been detained in December 2008 by
Israeli police on her return to Ramallah for violating the same
military order.]

* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Genocide
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* IDF
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* World Central Kitchen
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* WCK
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* Aid workers
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* war crimes
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* Palestinians
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* Hostages
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* Hamas
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Drones
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* killer drones
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* food aid
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* starvation
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