This week we received the tragic news that seven international aid workers were killed by Israeli airstrikes. An unfortunate mistake that cost the lives of innocent people, including three British nationals.
This is a tragedy of war that has sparked strong feeling against Israel. The anti-Israel propaganda has gone into overdrive and even Christians are questioning where they stand on this matter. This is why it is important we equip ourselves with the truth on this issue.
In this article:
- What Israel is doing to correct this mistake
- Dispelling the libel that Israel purposely targets aid workers
- Exposing the double standard against Israel
- Why Christians must not waiver in their support for Israel
The victims in this tragedy were all workers of the World Central Kitchen (WCK), a charity that delivers food in humanitarian crises around the world. They were: Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha (25, Gaza), Lalzawmi (Zomi) Frankcom (43, Australia), Damian Sobol (35, Poland), Jacob Flickinger (33, USA/Canada), John Chapman (57, UK), James (Jim) Henderson (33, UK), and James Kirby (47, UK).
As an Israeli spokesperson said this week, “WCK are some of the good guys.”
WCK helped Israelis following the 7th October massacres carried out by Hamas terrorists and they have been instrumental in delivering aid to Gazans during the last few months as Israel’s war against Hamas took hold of the Strip. They were instrumental in the maritime aid deliveries to Gaza, both in transporting aid by ship and the building of a jetty to get food into Gaza.
Israel has clearly appreciated WCK’s support in the effort to feed Palestinians and it is truly a shame that WCK has chosen to suspend its operations in Gaza following this incident.
It is important to note than an investigation is underway at this time to work out exactly what happened, so most of what we know right now is speculation. It seems though that three WCK vehicles that were traveling at night in Gaza were misidentified as Hamas vehicles and struck by the Israeli air force.
Hamas is known to use civilian infrastructure and vehicles, including ambulances, to hide its terrorist activities, including carrying out attacks from these vehicles or using them to transport weapons or personnel. The IDF is constantly monitoring Hamas movements and trying to catch them out.
Whilst we don’t know for certain what happened in this incident, it is likely that intel pointed to these vehicles being used by Hamas and were therefore labelled as a legitimate Hamas target when clearly they were not.
What is Israel doing to correct this mistake?
Israel has accepted responsibility for this “grave mistake”. They have apologised, saying “it should not have happened”. Israel is now launching full investigation into the incident and has even established a new Humanitarian Command Centre to improve the coordination of aid distribution in Gaza.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog also called Jose Andres, the founder of World Central Kitchen, expressing his “deep sorrow and sincere apologies” over the deadly strike.
Herzog added that Israel is committed to carrying out a thorough investigation of the incident and also “affirmed Israel’s commitment to delivering and upgrading humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza,’ and thanked Andres and the WCK for their “commitment to the wellbeing of Israelis and Palestinians, and to the values of humanity.”
It is clear that this was a mistake and that Israel’s political and military leaders are deeply troubled and remorseful about this tragic accident.
Dispelling the libel that Israel purposely targets aid workers
For years, Israel has been falsely accused of committing the worst atrocities. The lies of ‘apartheid’, ‘ethnic cleansing’, and ‘genocide’ have been thrown at Israel for decades, with renewed vigour these past few months. Israel cannot be committing ‘genocide’ when it has one of the lowest death ratios between combatants and civilians in recorded history. Israel cannot be an ‘apartheid state’ when Arabs, Jews and all others have equal rights. Israel is not trying to ‘ethnically cleanse’ Gaza when it is proving more food aid to its enemies than it did before the war began.
The latest libel is that Israel purposely targeted these aid workers because it wanted to stop Palestinians from receiving humanitarian assistance. This is a lie.
As stated above, Israel is transporting more food into Gaza than it did before the war. COGAT reports that before the war, approximately 70 trucks of food went from Israel into Gaza each day. Now, more than 200 trucks of food are being delivered into Gaza.
[Note: Some dispute this claim because Israel used to allow 500 trucks into Gaza each day, but the vast majority of these trucks were filled with other items like clothes, building materials, furniture, vehicles, toys, electronics etc. They wrongly think that these were 500 trucks of food when only 70 of them were for food.]
Israel has also worked with international organisations to help them in their aid endeavours by coordinating with aid organisations, approving the maritime aid corridor, and ensuring checks are made in Cyprus that are in line with Israeli security standards.
This type of action is unprecedented in war. Israel is feeding its enemy to a large extent. And this aid is unfortunately ending up in the hands of Hamas fighters who are using it to hunker down in their tunnels and hold Israeli hostages for longer than they would be able to if all aid was cut off to Gaza.
There is also a complete double standard here when we look at the world’s reaction to humanitarian crises that do not involved Israel.
Let’s look at a recent war between some of Israel’s neighbours.
It appears that starvation of the civilian population was used as a weapon of war by the Saudi backed coalition.
In 2018, a United Nations report estimated that 22 million people (More than 10 times more people than are in Gaza) were in need of food aid in Yemen with hundreds-of-thousands of children being at risk of starvation.
Save the Children estimates that 85,000 children starved to death in Yemen between 2015 and 2018. During that time, there was no international outrage against Saudi Arabia or its allies (which includes the UK and USA). There was also no international effort to deliver aid into Yemen. No maritime aid corridor was opened. This is despite the fact that Yemen has over 1,000 miles of coastline that aid could have been delivered to, far more than 25 miles of coastline Gaza has.
The world turned a blind eye to the suffering of Yemen’s civilian population as over 377,000 of them perished from war, famine, and a lack of access to medical care. The world did not utter a word as tens-of-thousands of Yemeni children starved to death.
Even Hamas themselves have killed hundreds (possibly thousands) of Gazans in the past few months by wayward rockets or by deliberately targeting civilians, stopping them from getting aid. However, instead of the world holding Hamas to account, they have instead believed the lies and blamed Israel.
Now, as Israel does everything it can to defeat Hamas terror whilst doing more for Palestinian civilians than Hamas has ever done for them, Israel is being accused of trying to starve Gazan’s to death. It is one of the most blatant smears in history, yet too many in the world are believing this evil lie.
Exposing the double standard against Israel
Incidents of friendly fire, misidentification, and misfired rockets happen in all wars. You do not need to look hard to see how UK and USA forces have themselves been responsible for mistaking civilians as being military targets. Innocent lives have been lost in war from misidentification and bad intel for years without the world turning against those countries and accusing them of ‘genocide’ or other such atrocities.
One example is how, in 2008, US forces accidentally killed 37 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children, when a wedding celebration was wrongly hit by an airstrike in the Taliban stronghold of Wech Baghtu. The tragedy led the Afghan President to call upon then President Barak Obama to “put an end to civilian casualties.” And yes, Obama’s vice president was the current US President Joe Biden.
Another example is from 2014 when the Dutch air force caried out an airstrike on a home near Mosul after US intelligence misidentified it as an Islamic state headquarters. Five years after the strike, the Dutch government compensated Basim Razzo, the only surviving victim of the airstrike, with a payment of nearly €1 million. Basim can no longer walk because of his injuries and in the strike his wife, daughter, brother, and nephew were killed.
These are just two examples of hundreds of times that Western militaries in modern wars have misidentified targets and wrongly killed innocent civilians. However, unlike when Israel makes a mistake, these incidents hardly received any media coverage. No one accused the USA or the Netherlands of trying to carry out a ‘genocide’ and there were no global calls for arms embargoes against them. People understood these incidents as being tragic accidents that are part of war.
The best example of the double standard against Israel, however, comes from how Western leaders treated Saudi Arabia during its war against the Houthis in Yemen.
As mentioned above, the death toll in Yemen between 2015 and 2018 was many times higher than what we are seeing in Gaza, and yet the world hardly knows this even happened. But there was some media coverage of Saudi’s airstrikes against Yemen that killed civilians and there was a question posed about a ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
On 9 August 2018, Saudi Arabian aircraft bombed a civilian school bus in Dahyan, Saada Governorate, Yemen, near the border with Saudi Arabia. At least 40 children were killed, all under 15 years old and most under age 10. Sources disagree on the exact number of deaths, but they estimate that the air strike killed about 51 people.
According to Save the Children, at the time of the attack the children were on a bus heading back to school from a picnic when the driver stopped to get refreshment at the market in Dahyan.
But it goes beyond just a single incident. What Saudi Arabia did in Yemen was far worse than anything Israel has done in Gaza.
Saudi forces carried out more than 25,000 air strikes on Yemen. Shockingly, only 32% of these strikes were identified as “military targets.” The vast majority were civilian or ‘other’.
According Campaign Against Arm Trade, air raids by Saudi Arabia frequently targeted civilian gatherings such as weddings and busy market places where there was no military target nearby, often with extremely deadly consequences. The school bus incident was just a single example.
This didn’t happen a long time ago, the ceasefire between the Saudis and the Houthis only came into effect in 2022 and there have been exchanges of fire since that time. So where was the global outrage? Where was the wall to wall coverage of every action Saudi Arabia made against the Houthis? Where were the mass protests on the streets of London, New York and every other major city in the world? Where was the international condemnation from world leaders? The world was silent when close to 400,000 people died in a war right next to Israel. The world did nothing as 85,000 children starved to death. And this was recent, just a few years ago.
The double standard gets worse.
Following the Saudi strike on a school bus filled with children, then UK Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt was asked about whether he would stop UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia and also pressure the USA into doing the same, after all, evidence pointed to the munition that killed the children being an American Lockheed Martin bomb.
Hunt’s response was very measured. He explained how he would talk about the incident with his US and Saudi counterparts but he reiterated that Saudi Arabia was an UK ally who was dealing with terrorists.
“We are their partners in fighting Islamist extremism and our relationship with Saudi Arabia means that we stop bombs going off on the streets of Britain,” said Hunt. [Note: That’s interesting, because that’s what Israel is doing right now in Gaza.]
Hunt then explained that the UK is “respecting that that they [the US and Saudi] are allies and so we will have these discussions, but very often they will be frank discussions in private rather than megaphone diplomacy.”
Do you see the difference between the way Israel is treated and the way Saudi Arabia was treated? Every one of Israel’s allies right now is using “megaphone diplomacy.”
This was just one war used as an example to highlight the double standard against Israel. There are countless other wars in recent history where the same standards have not been applied. NATO countries do not even hold themselves to as high a standard as they hold Israel, it seems.
They are condemning Israel at every opportunity which fuels the media frenzy surrounding the Israel-Gaza war and contributes to the shift in public opinion against Israel.
We should add that the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, adopted by many Western governments including the UK, states that it is antisemitic when “applying double standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
Applying a double standard to Israel is antisemitic. Is it any wonder then that we are seeing antisemitism growing around the world?
Why Christians must not waiver in their support for Israel
It is very easy for us to be manipulated by the hysteria that surrounds the Israel-Gaza conflict, and it is important for Christians to understand that not everything they read in the paper is an accurate representation of what is really happening.
God calls us to be lovers of the truth. The accusations against Israel are often distorted and conflated. The “father of lies” as the Bible calls Satan, is at work at all times because he seeks the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.
We can see how these lies are fuelling antisemitism. The gullible are playing into his hands.
One of the reasons Satan wants to destroy Israel is because if he can accomplish that he will make God a liar. The Bible declares that Israel and the Jewish people will never cease from being a nation.
Jeremiah 31:35-36 says:
This is what the LORD says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar– the LORD Almighty is his name:
“Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,” declares the LORD, “will the descendants of Israel ever cease to be a nation before me.”
So as sure as we know the sun will rise again tomorrow, we also know that Israel will continue.
This is why Satan has stirred up the hearts of men and women to hate Israel and the Jewish people. Antisemitism, Jew hatred, is the oldest hatred in the world and the most brutal. The Jewish people have been subjected to pogroms, inquisitions, genocides, the Holocaust, and more. The most recent example of this was on 7 October 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and murdered over 1,200 Jewish men, women, and children.
Even now, the enemies of Israel who seek her destruction are continuing this evil agenda to eradicate the world of its only Jewish state. And we can be sure that their aim is not just to destroy Israel, but to wipe out all Jews from the face of the earth. Shamefully, the biased media and foolish politicians are aiding an abetting this cause. Far from being the righteous cause they think it is, they are instead going against God.
God is the one who declared Israel as a nation. Israel does not want to fight these wars, but they have to. If Hamas, Iran, and all its terrorist proxies put down their weapons, there would be no more war. If Israel puts down its weapons, there would be no more Israel.
The Bible tells us that all the nations will turn against Israel in the end times. God also warns that He will judge the nations on how they treat His people and His nation, Israel.
Even when every nation on earth turns against Israel, Christians will NEVER turn their backs on her because we will not turn our backs on God. We will continue to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and give God no rest until He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.
Because we are Christians, we stand with Israel and the God of Israel. Now, and always.
