There are several things that are more or less undisputed about the Israeli airstrike that killed seven aid workers in Gaza:
- It happened around 11 pm.
- Three aid trucks were struck. All had World Central Kitchen logos on their roofs.
- The trucks were traveling on a coastal road approved for humanitarian missions.
- World Central Kitchen had properly coordinated their delivery route with Cogat, the Israeli military body responsible for coordinating aid missions.
- The trucks were struck sequentially and extremely precisely. According to a former counterterrorism official quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the complexity of the operation suggests it required multiple drones and two to three dozen operators and support staff. In other words, the aid trucks were very deliberately targeted and destroyed. It was no accident.
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So the only remaining question is: Why? Did the Israeli military deliberately destroy an aid convoy? Or, despite everything, did they somehow misidentify the trucks as Hamas?
I can hardly bring myself to believe it was deliberate. That would be monstrous. On the other hand, Israel's ongoing efforts to starve the Gazan population have been pretty monstrous. What's more, their recent acquiescence to increasing aid shipments has been very much against their will. Deliberately destroying an aid convoy would certainly be a very effective way of continuing their starvation policy by the simple expedient of scaring off humanitarian organizations. Finally, in addition to all this, it's just very hard to believe that an operation so precisely calculated and carried out was due merely to sloppy intel or a careless fog-of-war mistake.
I still don't believe it was deliberate. I can't. But it sure is getting harder.
Rules for thee must match rules for me or tyranny.
They were forced to allow the aid in and killing aid workers solves that problem.
Literally daring us to cut them off, and betting that we won't.
Are you kidding? Netanyahu has abundantly demonstrated that nothing is beyond him if it keeps him in office. And one of his main arguments for staying in office for a couple of weeks now has been about how he is the only one who can stand up to the US. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he were trying to teach Biden a lesson about who is in charge here.
Yes. ….. I once read a longish profile of Bibi. To cut to the chase, he really really really hates Palestinians, following in his father’s footsteps. He has always thought of the Pals as less than human, which is why Bibi failed so miserably before the Hamas attack. He had their plans. But believing that they had the brains and skills to pull it off would have required him renouncing his lifelong worldview. Much of the viciousness of his counterattack stems from his fury that he was outsmarted by a bunch of sub-humans. I’ve been waiting for him to put a billet in his own head in shame.
I'm afraid I don't have any problem believing it was deliberate. Israel has treated much of Gaza as a free-fire zone, where the IDF will kill anything that moves. That's how they killed ~100 people getting aid from trucks, and it's why they manage to kill Israeli hostages carrying white flags who thought they were near being rescued.
Here's a Guardian article -- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes -- explaining how Israel is dropping dumb bombs on family dwellings to kill low level Hamas members (remember, that includes all the Gazan police and government employees), treating the loss of their families as acceptable collateral damage.
When you look at the blind bombings, population starvation, killing of medical personnel, journalists and aid providers, it's pretty obvious that Israel is in a spasm of revenge killings. The only protests against the war in Israel seem to be about the low priority of rescuing hostages; if there are any protests against killing perhaps 20K or more civilians, I haven't seen any reference to them.