Seven aid workers killed in an airstrike in Gaza were marked as targets under an Israeli military practice of establishing guilt by association, a Guardian investigation shows. A top Israeli military prosecutor announced last month that he would not pursue criminal proceedings for the April 2024 incident in which drones fired missiles at three clearly marked World Central Kitchen (WCK) cars soon after they had escorted a food aid delivery to Gaza. Three British humanitarian workers along with an Australian, a Palestinian, a Pole and a dual US-Canadian national were killed.
The official Israel Defense Forces (IDF) version of events pointed to specific mistakes made by a handful of officers. The victims of the strike were also blamed for hiring armed guards to protect a food aid convoy and for allegedly “deviating” from their agreed route. However, interviews with senior Israeli officers involved in the incident or familiar with the official Israel investigation suggest it glossed over the role played in the killings by a common IDF practice used to designate targets, which endangers aid workers and civilians in general, especially when combined with the army’s open-ended mission to end Hamas’s civil control in Gaza.
More than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military in the three years of the Gaza war. The army’s own internal data suggests more than three-quarters of the dead have been civilians. The reserve colonel who ordered the strikes, Nochi Mendel, said the WCK workers became potential targets after they had a brief encounter, lasting just minutes, with armed guards assumed to be from Hamas (an assumption later shown to be groundless).
He deemed them to have “mixed together” with alleged Hamas militants, where mixing together was defined as being “near them, talking, playing, hanging out and so on”. Asked whether the presence of armed men made the entire convoy a target, Mendel replied: “Certainly.” He concluded: “They were not innocent because they were connected to Hamas.” Mendel was referring to a general policy of haflala, “incrimination”, which gives commanders in the field wide discretion on designating someone as a “terrorist”, including those “incriminated” by association. The manner in which haflala is to be applied in a given sector is often conveyed in a commander’s mission brief delivered verbally to other officers.
He said his unit had been commended by the army hierarchy for its involvement in several strikes on what were deemed to be Hamas attempted commandeering of aid. The difference in the WCK incident was that foreign nationals were killed, he said. Not a substantive difference.” When the WCK convoy was destroyed, it was nowhere near Israeli troops.
Several Israeli officers familiar with the incident said the strikes were not ordered on the basis of an imminent threat to Israeli lives, but to fulfil the mission to thwart Hamas attempts to control aid deliveries. The IDF was approached for comment on the issues raised by the airstrikes and subsequent investigations but had not responded three days after the request. The WCK said the Israeli decision not to pursue criminal proceedings was “inconsistent with the full truth and deeply offensive”.
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