Tag: Hamas

TEL AVIV: The Israeli army on Friday admitted a series of errors and violations of its rules in the killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, saying it had mistakenly believed it was “targeting armed Hamas operatives”.

The two brigade officers who ordered the drone strikes, a colonel and a major, are being fired, the army said, and its Southern Command chief reprimanded.

It was a rare confession of wrongdoing by Israel in its nearly six-month war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, where the health ministry of the Hamas-ruled territory says more than 33,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed.

The victims — an Australian, three Britons, a North American, a Palestinian and a Pole — were killed Monday night in three strikes over four minutes by an Israeli drone as they ran for their lives between their three vehicles, the military said.

The US-based charity for which they worked, World Central Kitchen, demanded an independent inquiry, and Poland called for a “criminal” probe after the military’s announcement.

The drone team who killed the aid workers made an “operational misjudgement of the situation” after spotting a suspected Hamas gunman shooting from the top of one of the food trucks the aid workers were escorting, an internal Israeli military inquiry found.

Senior Israeli officers showed reporters clips from drone footage of what they said was a “Hamas operative” joining the US-based World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy.

Although the roofs of the three aid workers’ vehicles were emblazoned with WCK logos, retired Israeli general Yoav Har-Even, who is leading the investigation, said the drone’s camera could not see them in the dark.

“This was a key factor in the chain of events,” he said.

The aid group has said its team was travelling in a “de-conflicted” area at the time of the strike. “Despite coordinating movements with the (Israeli army), the convoy was hit as it was leaving the Deir al-Balah warehouse,” WCK said.

The army said aid was moved at night to avoid deadly stampedes by hungry Gazans.

The aid workers’ deaths “outraged” US President Joe Biden who demanded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu order steps toward an “immediate ceasefire”.

Israel later said it would allow “temporary” aid deliveries into northern Gaza, where the United Nations has warned of imminent famine.

Har-Even admitted that “the three air strikes were in violation of standard operating procedures”.

But he argued that “the state of mind” of the Israeli drone commanders “was that they were striking cars that had been seized by Hamas” after they thought one passenger was carrying a gun rather than a bag.

“One of the commanders mistakenly assumed the gunmen were inside the vehicles and were Hamas terrorists,” the army said in a statement.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it was “very important that Israel is taking full responsibility for this incident.”

The aid workers were killed after they had overseen the unloading of a ship carrying 300 tonnes of food aid from Cyprus to a warehouse inland.

But as they drove south at 11:09 pm on April 1 the drone “struck one car, and identified people running out of the car and entering the second car,” Har-Even said.

“They decided to hit it, which was against standard operating procedures. Then they struck the third car.”

Asked by AFP, the general was not able to explain what happened to the “Hamas gunman” on the truck but he conceded they had been mistaken to think armed Hamas suspects had joined the WCK aid workers in the three pickups.

“It is a tragedy. It is a serious mistake that we are responsible for,” Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari told reporters. “That shouldn’t have happened.”

Har-Even said it was a breakdown in communication in the chain of military command which may have led to the strikes.

He said that WCK had provided all the information necessary, but it was not passed down.

“The biggest mistake was that (the drone team) didn’t have the coordination plan,” he said. “Their belief was the vehicles were Hamas, based on operational misjudgement and misclassification.”

Israeli forces on Monday pulled out of Gaza’s largest hospital complex after an intensive two-week military operation, leaving behind charred buildings and bodies strewn at the sprawling complex.

Israel said it had battled Palestinian militants hiding inside Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, killed at least 200 fighters and recovered large stockpiles of weapons, explosives and cash.

The health ministry in Gaza said that, after heavy Israeli air strikes and tank fire, “the scale of the destruction inside the complex and the buildings around it is very large”.

“Dozens of bodies, some of them decomposed, have been recovered from in and around the Al-Shifa medical complex,” the ministry said, adding that the hospital was now “completely out of service”.

A doctor told AFP more than 20 bodies had been recovered, some crushed by withdrawing vehicles.

Israeli attacks have also flared around other Gaza hospitals almost six months since October 7 attacks which have destroyed swathes of the besieged coastal territory.

The Hamas government press office said the army had blown up more than 20 houses within 24 hours in the main southern city of Khan Yunis, where battles have raged around the Nasser and Al-Amal hospitals.

Israel destroys hospital

Over the past two weeks, the Israeli army carried out what it labelled “precise operational activity” at the Al-Shifa complex, before declaring on Monday that the forces had withdrawn.

The scene left behind was one of devastation, with windows blown out, concrete walls blackened and volunteers carrying away shrouded corpses across the sandy wasteland.

Dozens of air strikes and shelling had hit the area around the complex in the morning, in heavy fire which the Hamas government media office said served to provide cover for the withdrawing troops and tanks.

The army has in recent days released footage of its fighters moving through the hospital’s corridors, and pictures of large numbers of assault rifles, grenades and other weapons it said were recovered from the maternity ward.

The military has said 200 Hamas fighters were killed in fighting in and around Al-Shifa.

Hamas has denied operating from Al-Shifa and other health facilities.

An Israeli strike also hit “a tent camp” inside central Gaza’s Al-Aqsa hospital compound, killing four people, said World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on social media platform X.

The MSF medical charity lamented Thursday that nothing had changed on the ground in genocide ravaged Gaza since the United Nations Security Council resolution this week demanding an “immediate ceasefire”.

After more than five months of war, the UN Security Council for the first time Monday demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza after Israel’s ally the United States, which vetoed previous drafts, abstained.

That resolution demanded an “immediate ceasefire” for the ongoing Muslim holy month of Ramadan, leading to a “lasting” truce.

But since then, “we haven’t seen any change after this resolution on the ground,” Christos Christou, MSF’s international president, told AFP in an interview.

“We haven’t seen any impact in… people’s lives there every day; we haven’t seen an impact in our world, (and the) ways of delivering the humanitarian aid,” he said.

“The situation remains the same.”

And Christou stressed that MSF’s demands also remained unchanged.

What was needed, he said, was an immediate and lasting ceasefire, a halt to all attacks on medical installations and personnel, and “unhindered humanitarian aid in Gaza”.

For now, he acknowledged that “our efforts are just a little drop in the ocean of needs”.

MSF still has local and international staff working in the few hospitals that are still functioning in Gaza.

The organisation is among other things working to care for women after they undergo a caesarian section.

He pointed out that in many cases, women who gave birth via a caesarian section were “literally kicked out of the hospital after a couple of hours because there were no beds”.

“MSF has increased the capacity of beds in order to offer at least some quality of care to these women,” he said.

Israel’s intensified attacks have killed at least 32,552 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

Christou said MSF was “extremely worried” about Israeli plans to push its ground offensive into Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city which is packed with some 1.5 million people, many of them displaced from other parts of the territory.

“This would be really catastrophic.”