A US-based aid group admitted Friday that a group of individuals — who the Israeli military says were armed — took control of an aid convoy in the southern Gaza Strip the day before, without the organization having vetted them or coordinated the matter with the Israel Defense Forces.
The military said Thursday that it struck the gunmen, killing them while not harming aid workers.
According to the IDF, Hamas operatives frequently try to hijack aid deliveries.
The IDF had said on Thursday that a convoy of aid trucks from the American Near East Refugee Aid (Anera) organization entered the southern Rafah area with Israeli coordination. It said that during the drive, it identified a group of gunmen taking over a vehicle at the front of the convoy and beginning to lead it. The IDF described the act as a hijacking attempt.
Shortly afterward, the IDF said it was able to determine that it could strike just the car with the gunmen, without harming the rest of the convoy, and so it carried out a strike, killing at least four.
First, these yahoos have no credibility after repeatedly lying and covering their criminal asses, so just from it’s sources, this very neat explanation is suspect from the get go.
Second, the very framing of the situation (unknown gunmen hijackers) is itself highly loaded and designed to make the Israelis and their enablers to feel OK about an attack on an aid convoy. It is meant to convey certainty that these were nefarious Nazgûl that just had to be taken out. For all we know, they could just as well be non-hamas good Samaritan actors trying to help the aid workers navigate the ruins of the bombed out ghetto because there is a famine going on. We have no way of knowing without an independent investigation. But that’s impossible because Netanyahu’s political survival depends on a forever war.
Third, there is obviously here the narrative of the moral army, that only takes necessary action, very carefully etc. This narrative seems to only come up when non-palestinians are involved, as is the case here, because Palestinian lives simply don’t really matter to them. Again, notice how there is zero information or concern about who the dead actually were and what their motivations and behaviour actually was. They simply don’t matter: they were Palestinians.