Israel on Saturday said it had killed a World Central Kitchen worker it accused of taking part in the Hamas-led attack that started the war in Gaza last year, in the second Israeli strike to kill workers affiliated with the aid group.
A spokeswoman for World Central Kitchen, a U.S.-based relief group, said on Saturday that three of its contractors had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a vehicle. In a statement, the aid group said that it “had no knowledge that any individual in the vehicle had alleged ties” to the Hamas-led attack.
“To the best of our knowledge, no WCK team members are affiliated with Hamas,” the spokeswoman, Linda Roth, said in an email.
The Israeli military declined to comment on the two other workers World Central Kitchen reported were killed.
The aid group said it was pausing operations in Gaza, where a dire humanitarian crisis is unfolding for some two million people. The organization took a similar action in April, after seven of its workers were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that the person it targeted in the latest strike had taken part in the Oct. 7 attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz, an Israeli village near the Gaza border where dozens of people were abducted. He had been monitored by Israeli “intelligence for a while and was struck following credible information regarding his real-time location,” the military said.
It added that it had targeted “a civilian unmarked vehicle, and its movement on the route was not coordinated for transporting of aid.”
Ms. Roth said that the vehicle was not branded, and that the aid group was investigating the situation.
COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for coordinating aid deliveries into Gaza, said it had demanded that World Central Kitchen investigate its hiring practices after the strike on the vehicle.
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World Central Kitchen is pausing operations in Gaza after Israel revealed one of its staff, Hazmi Kadih, killed in an airstrike this morning, took part in the October 7 Massacre in Kibbutz Nir Oz.
Hazmi Kadih was a terrorist who took part in invading Kibbutz Nir Oz during the October 7 massacre. Stop employing terrorists!
People on both sides will surely criticize WCK for this statement, but this is actually the appropriate response to learning that one of your employees was a member of a terrorist organization. The internal process allowed that needs to be fixed. It has no place in aid delivery.
We need a very public 3rd party to investigate Israel’s intentional targeting of aid workers, this has been beyond ridiculous that they have been able to take away with this
Australia actually did independently investigate the accidental strike on the WCK convoy. it's clear that aid agencies' negligence in properly vetting employees for terror links and failure to promptly report militarization of their facilities & vehicles plays a significant role in this.
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