Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that the country’s armed forces unintentionally killed seven aid workers from the food charity World Central Kitchen in an air strike in Gaza.
The victims were from Poland, Australia, and the U.K., and included a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen and a Palestinian.
“Unfortunately over the last day there was a tragic incident of an unintended strike of our forces on innocent people in the Gaza Strip,” Netanyahu said, adding that officials were “checking this thoroughly” and “will do everything for this not to happen again.”
The WCK has played a crucial role in arranging the delivery of aid supplies into Gaza through a maritime corridor established by Cyprus, the closest EU country to the enclave. Israel has repeatedly blocked aid from entering the area, and Palestinians are suffering from acute starvation.
In an earlier statement, WCK’s CEO Erin Gore wrote: “This is not only an attack against WCK, this is an attack on humanitarian organizations showing up in the most dire of situations where food is being used as a weapon of war. This is unforgivable.” The organization has suspended its operations in the region.
The incident comes amid an escalation in the Israel-Hamas war, with Iran blaming Israel for carrying out a strike in Syria that killed seven Iranian personnel, including top military officials.
The air strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus marked the first time Tehran has been has been directly targeted in Syria, Bloomberg noted. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a high-ranking Iranian official, was killed in the strike, and Iran summoned a Swiss envoy responsible for liaising between Washington and Tehran early on Tuesday, saying that the U.S. is partly responsible for the attack. The U.S. said it had no forewarning that such a strike would be carried out, Axios reported — a sign that Washington officials may fear a regional escalation in the conflict. A senior U.S. official that spoke to Axios said there was likely to be an increase in conflicts between Israel and Iranian proxy organizations.
Analysts believe that the strike in Syria increases the likelihood that Iran will strike back against Israel and the U.S., which it views as responsible for the attack. “A response is guaranteed. The Q is whether it’ll target #Israel, Israelis, U.S. regional assets… or something else,” Charles Lister, senior fellow and director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria program, wrote on X. Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, echoed the sentiment: “We may see an increase or a resumption of attacks by Iraqi militias and Syrian militias against US troops,” he told CNN. “And that would mean that the Israeli attack on Iran actually puts a target on the backs of American troops in the Middle East.”
