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The killing of foreign aid workers in Gaza has piled further pressure on Israel over its conduct of the war against Hamas, renewing scrutiny of how the Israeli army selects its targets in an ongoing military campaign that has devastated most of the Gaza Strip and killed or maimed tens of thousands of its inhabitants.
Israeli officials have promised a thorough investigation after seven staff of the US-based charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) were killed in an air strike in central Gaza on Monday – an attack UN chief Antonio Guterres described as “unconscionable” and “an inevitable result of the way the war is being conducted”.
The WCK workers, six of them foreign nationals, had been travelling in two armoured cars bearing the charity’s logo, and a third “soft-skinned” vehicle, along a route preapproved and coordinated with the Israeli army. Defence sources told Haaretz that the convoy was hit three times by missiles fired from a drone because of erroneous suspicions that a terrorist was on board.
In a video message on Wednesday, the top commander of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), chief of general staff Herzi Halevi, called the incident a “grave mistake”. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had earlier voiced regret for “a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people” in Gaza.
“It happens in war,” Netanyahu added as he left hospital after undergoing hernia surgery. “We will do everything so that this thing does not happen again.”
International reactions were swift and damning, with US President Joe Biden saying he was “outraged and heartbroken” and accusing Israel of not doing enough to protect “aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians”. Biden called for a “swift” investigation to bring accountability to what he said was not a “stand-alone…
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Source : france24
