This wasn’t an accident. It was no mistaken misfire.
The IDF cell tracking the vehicles fired lethal precision guided missiles into each car, one after the other.
Through blurred night-time surveillance footage, they saw what they thought was a man carrying a gun and assumed he was a Hamas fighter.
Read more: IDF releases findings of what went wrong in strike that killed aid workers
They then assumed everyone else travelling in the vehicles were also Hamas. There was no evidence for this.
They kept firing because they saw passengers still alive.
The basic failure to pass details of the aid convoy down the chain of command is a damning stain on a military that thinks of itself as being one of the best in the world.
The decision to launch airstrikes with the intent of killing people, based on unsound evidence, raises deeply troubling questions of ethics in combat.
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It’s a sad irony, that one of the only reasons that World Central Kitchen (WCK) was operating at night was because of their previously good working relationship with the Israeli military.
A British security adviser who has been working in Gaza in recent months, told me that few other organisations travel after dark, but it helps stop looting and WCK would have been confident it could move safely with IDF support and co-ordination.
John Chapman, James Henderson and James Kirby all died in the Israeli strike
Had six of the seven killed not been foreign aid workers, whose deaths caused an international outcry, then this investigation would not have happened, and the Israeli military would not have been forced to explain its actions.
How many Palestinian civilians therefore have been killed in similar, uninvestigated cases of mistaken identity? We will probably never know.
Calls for the UK to suspend arms sales to Israel will undoubtedly grow following publication of these findings, however the British government is unlikely to base any decision on this one event.
Read more:
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Aid convoy attack report released
UK arms sales to Israel are minuscule, making up only around 0.02% of the country’s annual imports – any suspension therefore would be more symbolic than materially consequential, and to make the call only as a result of this incident would be disproportionate.
However, if government lawyers believe this wasn’t an isolated case, then the Foreign Office might have no choice but to act.
