CAIRO (AP) — Two basic mistakes, according to the Israeli military. First, officers overlooked a message detailing the vehicles in the convoy. Second, a spotter saw someone boarding one car, carrying something – possibly a bag – that he thought was a weapon. Officials say the result was the series of Israeli drone strikes that killed seven aid workers on a dark Gaza road.
The Israeli military has described the deadly strike on the World Central Kitchen convoy as a tragic error. Its explanation raises the question: If that’s the case, how often has Israel made such mistakes in its 6-month-old offensive in Gaza?
Rights groups and aid workers say Monday night’s mistake was hardly an anomaly. They say the wider problem is not violations of the military’s rules of engagement but the rules themselves.
In Israel’s drive to destroy Hamas after its Oct. 7 attacks, the rights groups and aid workers say, the military seems to have given itself wide leeway to determine what is a target and how many civilian deaths it allows as “collateral damage.”
More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive, around two-thirds of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Its count doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israel says it is targeting Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that it tries to minimize civilian deaths. It blames the large number of civilian casualties on militants and says it’s because they operate among the population. Israel says each strike goes through an assessment by legal experts, but it has not made its rules of engagement public.
OTHER STRIKES
In the thousands of strikes Israel has carried out, as well as shelling and shootings in ground operations, it’s impossible to know how many times a target has been wrongly identified. Nearly every day, strikes level buildings with Palestinian families inside, killing men, women and children, with no explanation of the target or independent accountability over the proportionality of the strike.
Sarit Michaeli, spokeswoman for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, said the World Central Kitchen strike drew world attention only because foreigners were killed.
“The thought that this is a unique case, that it’s a rare example — it’s an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has been following the situation,” she said.
She said a broader investigation is needed into the rules of engagement: “The relevant questions aren’t asked because the investigations only deal with specific cases, rather than the broader policy.”
Israel’s chief military spokesman, Daniel Hagari, acknowledged, “Mistakes were conducted in the last six months.”
“We do everything we can not to harm innocent civilians,” he told reporters. “It is hard because Hamas is going with civilian clothes … Is it a problem, is it complexity for us? Yes. Does that matter? No. We need to do more and more and more to distinguish.”
But the military hasn’t specified how it will achieve this.
Brig. Gen. Benny Gal, who was part of…
Read More: Israel-Hamas war: Israel says its strike that killed aid workers was a mistake