Killing aid workers

Few armed forces have managed to make murder and executions the stuff of procedural aberration rather than intentional practice. Killing civilians and unarmed personnel is the stuff of misreading and misunderstandings, albeit arrived at with good conscience. And so it was that the killing of 15 aid and emergency workers in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces on March 23 could be put down to “professional failures, breaches or orders and a failure to fully report the incident”, a finding identified by an investigation conducted by the same organisation into its own personnel.

In marking its own report card, and giving it a credible pass, the IDF found, using the dulling terms that make murder an afterthought, that the deaths were of minor if regretful consequence. While not explicitly libelling the dead workers, the official press release teeters on excuse and general exculpation, making it clear that, on March 23, “the troops were conducting a vital mission aimed at targeting terrorists.” The killings took place “in a hostile and dangerous combat zone, under a widespread threat to the operating troops.” The armed forces were presented with the dilemma of protecting medical and facilities (something the IDF has conspicuously failed to do), with the use by Hamas “of such infrastructure for terrorism, including ambulances to transport terrorists and weapons.”

The thick insinuation that the aid workers were more or less asking for it by being there in the first place emerges with unadorned rawness. And to suggest claims of execution or the bounding of any of the murdered before or after shooting were “blood libels and false accusations against IDF soldiers.”

The IDF press release leaves an impression of forced thoroughness. There had been “extensive data collection from operational systems, the forces on the ground, and along the entire chain of command.” This had also included “relevant operational orders and directives, footage from various surveillance systems active during the event, radio recordings.” There was even a reconstruction of the events, the personnel involved questioned.

The inquiry identified three shooting incidents: the first involving troops firing on an alleged Hamas vehicle; the second, involving firing on a fire truck and ambulances close to the area where the troops were operating after the deputy battalion commander identified the vehicles as “employed by Hamas forces, who arrived to assist the first vehicle’s passengers”; and the third involving an attack by the IDF on a Palestinian UN vehicle “due to operational errors in breach of regulation.”

The inquiry did little to consider the damning evidence arising from a video of one of the slain workers, Red Crescent paramedic Rifaat Radwan, which prompted the IDF to change its initially fabricated story: that the vehicles had stealthily approached them without lights or markings in the menacing dark.

Excerpted: ‘Euphemistic Practices: The IDF, Killing Aid Workers and Self-Investigation’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org