Israel’s military said Friday that a deadly attack on a World Central Kitchen humanitarian convoy that killed seven of the organization’s members was a “serious violation” of its policies after the airstrikes prompted global outrage and a rare rebuke from the Biden administration.
The statement said the attack was the result of “errors” and was “contrary” to military procedures, adding that two officers would be dismissed and commanders reprimanded.
World Central Kitchen, in a statement Friday, said the findings were an “important step forward” but that the IDF “cannot credibly investigate its own failure in Gaza.”
“We demand the creation of an independent commission to investigate the killings of our WCK colleagues,” it said.
The attack on Monday highlighted the perils facing aid workers navigating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis during Israel’s punishing military offensive in Gaza: More than 180 aid workers have been killed, according to the United Nations.
The deaths of the WCK employees and volunteers — six of them foreign nationals, including one American — have prompted a reckoning regarding Israel’s military tactics in a way that strikes that have killed Palestinian civilians have not.
The IDF statement said a commander “mistakenly” assumed that Hamas gunmen were present in the convoy’s vehicles and that Israeli forces also failed to identify the vehicles as belonging to the WCK.
“The investigation’s findings indicate that the incident should not have occurred,” the statement said. “The strike on the aid vehicles is a grave mistake stemming from a serious failure due to a mistaken identification, errors in decision-making, and an attack contrary to the Standard Operating Procedures.”
In a separate briefing for reporters Thursday, the IDF said the biggest mistake was that the operators of the unmanned aerial vehicle tracking the convoy were not made aware of the aid convoy’s coordination plan.
And although WCK vehicles are marked with the organization’s logo and name on their roofs, that logo was not visible to the cameras tracking the vehicle at night, said Yoav Har-Even, head of the IDF fact-finding and assessment mechanism. He called that a key factor in the failure.
The IDF said three procedural rules were violated: The official coordination plan was not communicated from the top to the ground; the airstrike targets were confirmed only by seeing an armed man, which it said was an insufficient standard; and the shooting continued from one vehicle to another when the operator saw people running from the first vehicle after it was struck.
According to accounts of the attack, after the first vehicle was hit, passengers fled to the remaining two vehicles, which then moved on before each was hit, one after the other.
In the wake of the attack, President Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States, Israel’s strongest international backer, would have to reassess its policy toward Israel’s operation in Gaza unless steps were taken to protect aid workers and address the humanitarian situation in the enclave. The warning marked a rare moment when the United States suggested that support for Israel might be something other than unconditional.
Israel afterward announced steps to facilitate more aid deliveries — especially to the north of Gaza, which international organizations have said is at risk of famine — by reopening the Erez crossing into Gaza and using Israel’s Ashdod port for aid deliveries.
The WCK, in its statement, said the IDF acknowledged that the aid group’s teams complied with all proper communications procedures. The Israeli military’s own video of the attack, it added, “fails to show any cause to fire on our personnel convoy, which carried no weapons and posed no threat.” Edited footage was shown to reporters Thursday, but it did not show the moment the convoy was struck. The video has not been released publicly.
“Without systemic change, there will be more military failures, more apologies and more grieving families,” the WCK statement added. “The root cause of the unjustified rocket fire on our convoy is the severe lack of food in Gaza. Israel needs to dramatically increase the volume of food and medicine traveling by land if it is serious about supporting humanitarian aid.”
“It’s not enough to simply try to avoid further humanitarian deaths, which have now approached close to 200,” WCK founder José Andrés said in the statement. “All civilians need to be protected, and all innocent people in Gaza need to be fed and safe. And all hostages must be released.”
The group’s CEO, Erin Gore, said the IDF’s “apologies for the outrageous killing of our colleagues represent cold comfort.” The group said its operations, which were paused after the attack, remain suspended.
Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.
