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Did Israel deliberately target the aid workers?

José Andrés, the boss of World Kitchen finds it implausible that this could have been an accident.

"This was not just a bad luck situation where, 'Oops, we dropped a bomb in the wrong place,'" Andrés told the Reuters news agency, stressing that his team's vehicles were clearly marked and "it's very clear who we are and what we do."

"They were targeting us in a deconflicting zone, in an area controlled by IDF. They, knowing that it was our teams moving on that road... with three cars," he said, adding that he believed the seven aid workers killed by the strike in Gaza were targeted "systematically, car by car."

"The airstrikes on our convoy I don't think were an unfortunate mistake," he told Israel's Channel 12 in a separate interview. "It was really a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by everybody at the IDF."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-gaza-world-central-kitchen-strike-jose-andres-direct-attack-aid-workers/

But wait: this makes no sense, right? Israel is doing all of this to get Hamas. Israel is an ally and cares about human rights?

It would make no sense at all if those were actually the war aims. However, if you think (as I have since the start) that Israel's aim is the full depopulation of Gaza, then targeting aid workers is entirely consistent with that. The diplomatic pressure put in Egypt to take refugees, the indiscriminate targeting of civilians, the destruction of hospitals, the restriction on even the American military's relief efforts... It all points to one thing: making life in the Gaza Strip so intolerable that none of the two million people can live there.

Most people in Gaza are close to starvation and now less food is getting in because civilian aid workers are terrified of being taken out by and IDF missile strike. Sure, targeting people who are citizens of allied countries gives you a diplomatic hit but they have got away with everything else so far, so why not push things a little further? Some people will still believe them and Western politicians can go on pretending.

Our governments are still giving Israel, money, arms and diplomatic cover. How many more people will die before that changes?
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Ynotisay · M
All well-stated but don't you think that Israel would have considered the consequences of specifically targeting them? They didn't consider public perception or the response from other nations? Particularly their allies who lost citizens in this? I don't know. I just don't see the upside or goal here. If it was to stop humanitarian aid I just don't see that happening.
Burnley123 · 41-45, M
@Ynotisay It could well have nd up being a mistake within their own terms. Perhaps the thing that they did to push it too far.

As I said, they are taking a hit for this. You can like it to football (soccer) when a player gets a yellow card doing a foul to stop the other team scoring. It's a cost-benefit thing but maybe this time they have it wrong.

Sunak is under serious pressure to stop arms sales to Israel.
Ynotisay · M
@Burnley123 You're right. They are under serious pressure. Reporting is saying that Biden had a tense call with Netanyahu and is pushing for a cease fire. What they do now is going to influence the U.S. and other allies moving forward. But having seen some clips of IDF soliders just losing their minds and killing people without justification tells me that those on the ground might be fighting a different kind of war.