Israel admitted on Tuesday an “unintentional” strike in the Gaza Strip which killed seven collaborators of the humanitarian NGO World Central Kitchen delivering food to the besieged Palestinian territory and threatened with famine.
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Based in the United States, the NGO World Central Kitchen, one of the few still operating in the Palestinian territory devastated by nearly six months of war between Israel and Palestinian Hamas, announced that it was “suspending its operations in the region” after the strike on Monday in Deir al-Balah (center).
Several countries and organizations have condemned this raid, with some demanding “explanations” from Israel, whose army is carrying out a large-scale offensive in Gaza in retaliation for an attack of unprecedented scale on Israeli soil on October 7.
“Unfortunately yesterday (Monday) there was a tragic incident where our forces unintentionally struck innocent people in the Gaza Strip,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.
“This happens in a war, we will check until the end, we are in contact with the governments and will do everything to ensure that this never happens again,” he added.
“Targeted attack”
“Devastated”, the NGO WCK confirmed that “seven members of the team were killed in Gaza in a strike by Israeli forces”.
“I am heartbroken and dismayed that we, World Central Kitchen and the world, lost beautiful lives today due to a targeted attack by Israeli forces,” said WCK President Erin Gore .
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The victims were “from Australia, Poland, the United Kingdom, (and also included) a citizen with dual American and Canadian nationality and a Palestinian person,” according to the NGO.
Since the start of the war, WCK has participated in humanitarian operations, notably by providing meals in the Palestinian territory, where the majority of the approximately 2.4 million inhabitants are threatened with famine according to the UN. She helped send the first aid boat from Cyprus to Gaza in mid-March.
Historical allies of Israel, the United States called for a “rapid and impartial” investigation. Britain summoned the Israeli ambassador on Tuesday to express its “unequivocal condemnation” of the deaths of the seven people, including three Britons.
The WCK victims were taken to Deir el-Balah hospital. An AFP correspondent saw five bodies and three foreign passports near the remains.
In an AFP image we can see the body of one of the victims wearing a black T-shirt with the NGO logo. Others show the wrecked carcass of the vehicle, a gaping hole in the roof, right over the WCK logo.
Nearly 33,000 dead
Since the start of the war, several NGOs present in Gaza have claimed that their employees or sites had been hit by Israeli strikes.
On October 7, Hamas commandos infiltrated from Gaza carried out an attack in southern Israel which resulted in the deaths of at least 1,160 people, mainly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official data. . According to Israel, around 250 people were kidnapped and 130 of them are still hostages, including 34 who died in Gaza.
Vowing to destroy Hamas, Israel launched an intense aerial bombardment campaign on Gaza, followed by a ground offensive that saw its soldiers advance from the north to the south of the small strip of land.
At least 32,916 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in Israeli operations, the Hamas health ministry said, reporting more than 70 Palestinians killed in the past 24 hours in incessant Israeli bombardments.
Destructions, corpses
On Monday, after 18 days of operations, Israeli soldiers withdrew from the al-Chifa hospital complex in Gaza, leaving behind immense destruction and corpses.
Soldiers “killed more than 200 terrorists and arrested more than 900 terrorism suspects” at the site of the ruined hospital, the army said after blaming Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, for using the hospital as a “command center”.
The Hamas-run Gaza Civil Defense reported 300 deaths in and around the hospital in Israeli operations.
Doctors and civilians at the complex told AFP that at least 20 bodies had been found, some of which appeared to have been driven over by military vehicles.
“Condemnation and denunciation are not enough in the face of the crimes that continue in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem,” declared Tuesday at the opening of the council of ministers the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Mohammed Mustafa.
According to him, the operation in al-Chifa is a “real war crime”.
The war has also exacerbated fears of a conflagration in the region. On Monday, 13 people were killed in an unprecedented raid attributed to Israel against the consular section of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, according to state television in Tehran.
Iran vowed to retaliate for the raid “by the Zionist regime,” while the European Union called for “restraint.”