IDF disciplines officers for Gaza aid worker deaths

The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday said it reprimanded one commanding officer and fired another for mishandling an incident in which IDF troops killed aid workers. The news was part of an IDF report that concluded that tactical errors and poor visibility contributed to its troops firing on and killing 15 Palestinians in Gaza, including many aid workers. The report also said the fired commander did not correctly report the March 23 incident.

The IDF said its General Staff Fact Finding Mechanism, led by Yoav Har-Even, spent weeks gathering details and reconstructing the event to determine what happened.

What happened on March 23? That night, IDF soldiers shot people emerging from a fire truck and ambulance very close to them, acting on the now-fired commander’s belief that they were Hamas terrorists. The IDF said the commander did not see that the vehicles belonged to aid workers until coming closer after the shooting ended. The heavy fire killed 15 people, including rescue workers and six Hamas terrorists, according to the IDF. The IDF troops also fired on a Palestinian United Nations vehicle about 15 minutes later, the report said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said that eight of the deceased were Palestine Red Crescent volunteers. They were responding to casualties in the Rafah area, according to the Red Cross. A top United Nations relief official, Tom Fletcher, said the other seven killed were all aid workers affiliated with the UN or Palestinian Civil Defense.

What did the IDF do with the bodies and vehicles? The IDF removed and buried the bodies and crushed the vehicles. The report said representatives of the IDF discussed their decision to remove the bodies with the United Nations and other international organizations, though the Red Cross says it was unaware of the location of the bodies until March 30. The decision to crush the vehicles was wrong, the IDF report said.

Dig deeper: Read my report on the Israeli military’s plans for a buffer zone in Gaza.