The killing of the seven aid workers, including three British security managers, has brought universal condemnation. But is it a tipping point in the support of Israel’s close allies, the US and Britain in the lead? UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said the attack was “the inevitable result of the way in which the war has been conducted”.
James Kirby, John Chapman, James Henderson and colleagues from Australia, Poland and Palestine were killed as their convoy was moving away from delivering food aid to a warehouse along a designated route agreed with the Israel Defence Forces. Their cars were hit three times in three separate missile strikes — grounds for suspicion about motivation and targeting.
Israel is gaining a reputation for making rules, breaking them, and ignoring them altogether. The Gaza strike, which has led to the suspension of crucial aid convoys, came the day after a designated, and presumably deliberate, air strike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus. It killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander, General Hassan Mahdavi, and more than a dozen civilians, according to first reports. It was a breach of diplomatic norms and convention — to put it mildly.
Former senior British security officials have counselled an immediate halt to the supply of arms and lethal aid sales to Israel. President Joe Biden, who has expressed outrage, must now consider a pause in the copious US military aid to Israel, which has continued throughout the Gaza war.
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his spokesmen claim that most Israelis support his war of retribution against Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza. According to his spokesman Mark Regev this morning, they “back Netanyahu fighting Hamas before the release of the hostages” taken on October 7. Their release is a prospect well beyond the horizon now. To many Israelis it looks a hopeless cause. The deliberate strike on the aid convoy brings the number of relief workers killed in the conflict to 196, as well as 175 UN staff. The UN has recorded what they see as three deliberate attacks on aid convoys and distributions this year alone.
The mainstream liberal daily Haaretz has disputed the IDF claim that it has killed 9,000 Hamas terrorists in Gaza so far — a terrorist being any Palestinian shot in a “kill zone” designated by the army — according to testimony from reserve officers returning from the war.
The war of retribution and eradication for the Hamas atrocities of October 7 seems to be rapidly losing tactical focus and a coherent, strategic end. Netanyahu, like his extreme political partners Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, believes that they can achieve not only a Gaza without Hamas, but without a meaningful Palestinian presence at all. Today the Haaretz editorial doesn’t call for yet another incoherent inquiry, but states simply: “The time has come to end the war.”
