Behind the Deadly Mistakes of Israel’s Military in Gaza

Jared Malsin, Stephen Kalin and Margherita Stancati

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A convoy of three vehicles ferried workers with aid group World Central Kitchen along the Gaza Strip’s coastal road on Monday night.

In the darkness above, an Israeli military drone scanned for enemy forces. The aircraft’s operators identified the convoy as a hostile target and opened fire. Missiles slammed into the vehicles, one after the other, killing seven people heading back from bringing food to the hungry.

The deaths have crystallized a broad international backlash against Israel’s war in Gaza. President Biden called for an immediate cease-fire during a phone conversation Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden suggested that further U.S. support would depend on Israel taking steps to protect aid workers and civilians.

“This is not a stand-alone incident,” Biden said Wednesday about the deadly strike. “Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians.”

The Israeli military on Friday said its investigation into the incident found that troops lacked the evidence to order the strikes and twice violated its operating rules. It said it had dismissed two officers and reprimanded three.

For six months, Israeli forces, responding to the Oct. 7 attack that killed more than 1,200 men, women and children, have waged a broad campaign to destroy the Islamist militant group Hamas. More than 20,000 people who shouldn’t have been targets are believed to have been killed by the army—the majority of them Palestinian civilians, but also captive Israeli hostages, relief workers and journalists, according to Palestinian health officials, the U.N. and organizations tracking the war. Israel said it doesn’t target civilians.

Since the start of the war, nearly 200 aid workers have been killed, including 175 U.N. staff in Gaza, making it the U.N.’s deadliest, according to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

Aid groups making efforts to alert the military about their plans and movements have been hobbled by miscommunication between Israel’s civilian and military branches. The World Central Kitchen convoy coordinated its trip ahead of time with the Israeli military. It passed through Israeli checkpoints, traveled a road used for aid deliveries and yet was struck anyway.

The scale of civilian deaths since Oct. 7 stems, in part, from the way Israel is going about the war, which is waged in a densely populated urban area where combatants mix with civilians. Israeli troops have wide latitude to carry out orders to destroy the enemy, and many are exhausted after nearly six months of urban fighting.

“When you get nonspecific tasks from the national authority—destroy, annihilate Hamas, wipe them out—at some point, those kinds of things actually have to be translated into tasks on the ground for soldiers and units to actually orchestrate,” said Gen. Joseph Votel, a former chief of the U.S. Central Command during the U.S.-led war on Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Remains of a car driven by a worker of World Central Kitchen after an Israeli strike on Monday. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Workers of World Central Kitchen gathering at Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, Gaza, where the bodies of slain colleagues were taken. PHOTO: HAITHAM IMAD/SHUTTERSTOCK

With those imperatives, Votel said, humanitarian concerns get less attention.

The Israeli military often grants wide authority for commanders on the ground to call for airstrikes during wartime, said people familiar with the operations of Israeli forces. The rules are more like a broad set of procedures that depend on the situation, current and former Israeli military legal advisers said. They described two types of airstrikes.

The first are planned strikes on known targets. The second type of strikes are based on real-time information. They are usually carried out by drones against suspected combatants identified by soldiers on the ground. A commanding officer, located in a room with drone operators at an air force base, works with commanders at division, brigade or company level who can order strikes.

Both types of strike can require higher approval, depending on location and the potential for collateral damage, according to an Israeli military legal adviser.

A drone-operations room seen by The Wall Street Journal last year, under the command of a 27-year-old major, had three worn chairs in front of three video monitors showing the grainy black-and-white images from drones: One soldier pilots the aircraft while another manages its cameras. A red button fires the missile. The soldiers work in four-hour shifts.

Israeli soldiers don’t always see a clear distinction between civilians and militants. Reservists said in interviews that Hamas militants dress in civilian clothes and roam about unarmed, picking up weapons hidden in residential areas when they engage Israeli troops. Israel has said Hamas operates from hospitals and hides among civilians. Hamas denies using civilians as human shields and says Israel is responsible for killing civilians.

In Gaza, an urban area with a prewar population of 2.2 million people, the need for humanitarian organizations to coordinate with the Israeli forces is crucial.

The United Nations and other aid groups share the coordinates of their guesthouses, warehouses and other premises with the Israeli military, which adds them to a list of what should be protected sites that are shared with pilots and ground troops. Aid groups also share their movements with Israeli forces ahead of time. In particularly dangerous areas, such as northern Gaza, the Israeli military mostly denies aid missions on security grounds.

The aid workers killed in the Israeli strike were, top row, Damian Soból of Poland and Zomi Frankcom of Australia; middle row, John Chapman, Jim Henderson and James Kirby of the U.K.; and bottom row, Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, a Palestinian, and Jacob Flickinger, a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen.WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN/REUTERS (5), WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES 2)

No solutions

American Near East Refugee Aid paused its operations in Gaza after the strike on the World Central Kitchen convoy, said Sean Carroll, president of Anera. Its staff for the first time in the war no longer felt comfortable with the risks, he said. The U.S. relief organization has operated in the occupied Palestinian territories for more than five decades.

Carroll said he doesn’t know what safety measures to seek from the Israeli military. Giving advance notice of plans and movements, known as deconfliction, is already standard procedure. World Central Kitchen has employed security consultants and even some armored cars, he said: “That’s not going to help, so what is? The only thing you can think of is deconfliction, but that’s what we’ve done. So I don’t know what it is.”

Communication between humanitarian groups and the Israeli military passes through the military’s civil administration agency, called Cogat, before heading to Israeli forces on the ground. A senior U.N. humanitarian official said she saw problems with the process during the months she participated after Oct. 7. “We would have an agreement with Cogat, but it wasn’t necessarily conveyed by IDF to their soldiers at the checkpoint,” the official said.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday that the Israeli military planned to set up direct coordination with international aid organizations. The war has taken an unprecedented toll on U.N. and other aid workers.

The majority of the dead were Palestinian employees of Unrwa, which is leading the humanitarian response on behalf of other U.N. agencies and aid groups. Unrwa workers supply food to an estimated 1.1 million people, as well as staff medical centers and run shelters for displaced Gazans. Unrwa said around 160 of its facilities have been damaged in the fighting.

Palestinians line up for a food Tuesday in Rafah, Gaza. PHOTO: FATIMA SHBAIR/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Volunteers of World Central Kitchen preparing food last month in Rafah, Gaza. PHOTO: HAITHAMI IMAD/SHUTTERSTOCK

In February, an Unrwa convoy carrying food was hit by the Israeli navy along a coastal road while it waited for permission from Israeli forces to cross into northern Gaza. The Israeli military said the convoy was struck by mistake. Unrwa suspended aid deliveries to the north.

The war has been the most lethal war for journalists: 95 killed since Oct. 7, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which began collecting data in 1992.

Israeli fire also has killed some of the more than 200 Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, as well at least 20 of its own soldiers in friendly fire, among the more than 250 soldiers killed since Oct. 7.

In total, the war has claimed the lives of more than 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza, some 72% of them women and children, according to the territory’s health officials. The military campaign has obliterated schools, hospitals and cultural centers. Airstrikes have hit residential high-rise buildings and crowded refugee camps. The scale and speed of the killing of civilians in Gaza has surpassed other conflicts in recent history, according to many humanitarian groups.

TAP FOR SOUNDIsrael said it would increase the amount of aid going into Gaza to “prevent a humanitarian crisis,” hours after a tense phone call between President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Photo: Dawood/Xinhua/Zuma Press

‘I am so scared’

A key principle of international law is that the level of civilian casualties resulting from any military strike should be proportional to the military value of the target.

Israel has chosen to take “a capacious definition of what constitutes necessity for military actions,” said Craig Jones, the author of a book on Israeli and U.S. military legal strategy and a lecturer in political geography at the U.K.’s Newcastle University.

The urban landscape of Gaza makes precision difficult. Hamas is a guerrilla force fighting in and among civilians, in an area about the size of Philadelphia. People are trapped in the coastal enclave by Israel on one side and Egypt on the other. Israeli population centers are in close range, increasing the urgency for intercepting threats.

“The whole purpose of targeting is to kill the ones that we are after, that is the Hamas terrorists, and to avoid unintended casualties among civilians, which is very hard to do in such a condensed place like Gaza,” said Maj. Gen. Tamir Heyman, a former head of intelligence for the Israeli military.

Residents searching for victims Thursday in the rubble of a house hit in an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Gaza. PHOTO: HAITHAM IMAD/SHUTTERSTOCK

Israeli military personnel driving near the Israel-Gaza border on Wednesday. PHOTO: HANNAH MCKAY/REUTERS

The lack of clarity about Israel’s rules of engagement or explanations for strikes on noncombatants has led many civilians in Gaza to feel deliberately targeted. One journalist said her family, fearful of harm to her children, asked her to stay somewhere else.

Among the civilians killed in Gaza was 6-year-old Hind Rajab. On Jan. 29, she was caught in heavy fighting in Gaza City. The relatives she was with were killed, and the girl was able to reach emergency responders.

“I am so scared, please come. Please call someone to come and take me,” Hind told a phone operator of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, according to a recording of the call. The medical aid group dispatched an ambulance. It never returned. Hind’s body was found 12 days later near the charred remains of the ambulance.

“There was coordination for safe access with the Israeli military. We were given a map and a route to follow,” said Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the PRCS. “In the end it didn’t matter. Hind was killed, along with our two colleagues.”

U.S. officials urged Israeli authorities to investigate what happened to Hind. The Israeli military at the time told Israeli media that a preliminary investigation suggested its troops weren’t in the area. An Israeli military spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“We have to use this moment to say, ‘OK, not just World Central Kitchen,’” said Carroll, president of the aid organization Anera. “We want all of the incidents investigated.”

Dov Lieber, Omar Abdel-Baqui, Chao Deng, Anat Peled, Nancy A. Youssef and Fatima AbdulKarim contributed to this article.

Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com, Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com and Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com