Arab Organisation for Human Rights in the UK (AOHR UK) stressed that the targeting and killing of 7 employees of an international relief agency at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) is a message to the world that Israel is above the law, does not fear any kind of accountability, and would continue committing crimes against anyone standing in its way as long as it has weapons, including anyone trying to feed the people it had been trying to exterminate for past six months.
On Monday, April 1, 2024, the IOF targeted a humanitarian aid convoy as it was leaving one of the relief warehouses in central Gaza, resulting in the killing of 7 employees of the World Central Kitchen (WCK), including an Australian, 3 Brits, a Polish, and an American/Canadian citizen, in addition to a Palestinian driver.
WCK identified the seven workers as Saifeddin Issam Avad Abutaha, 25, of Palestine; Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, 43, of Australia; Damian Soból, 35, of Poland; Jacob Flickinger, 33, of the United States and Canada; John Chapman, 57, of the United Kingdom; James ‘Jim’ Henderson, 33, of the U.K.; and James Kirby, 47, of the U.K.
Since the beginning of the war, at least 196 aid workers have been killed, most of whom are UNRWA employees from Palestinians. Nobody paid any attention to their killing as they were Palestinians killed among more than 140,000 Palestinians killed and wounded since October 7, 2023.
The disgraceful silence of the international community on the targeting of civilians, including international relief workers and their headquarters, has encouraged the occupation to commit such a crime.
This brutal attack is not only targeting WCK, but rather an attack on all humanitarian and relief agencies trying to alleviate the suffering of the people during the devastating war in which food is used as a weapon against civilians.
The international inaction towards the crimes of the Israeli occupation against civilians in Gaza since the first day of the war, which has been ongoing for 180 days, is the main reason behind its increased brutality.
The IOF has committed huge crimes with documented evidence against children, women and defenceless civilians that should have required a serious deterrent action to be taken to put an end to these atrocities, but instead, the West continues to fuel the Israeli killing machine with weapons and military ammunition, financial, political and logistical support, despite the UN resolutions.
The crime against the aid workers was deliberate and planned, contrary to the lies of the IOF commanders and the occupation prime minister, as the armoured cars in which the victims were inside had already coordinated with the IOF before and after leaving the warehouses in Deir al-Balah, which reveals the occupation’s intention to target the cars with three consecutive missiles.
AOHR UK denounced the position of the countries of the victims which called on Israel to carry out a comprehensive investigation and reveal the circumstances of the crime, as if it was a separate crime to what Israel had been doing against civilians throughout the genocidal war.
Calling on Israel to conduct an investigation is ridiculous as it is the duty of the countries to which the victims belong, most notably the US and the UK, to impose sanctions and stop the flow of weapons to the Israeli occupation, without which this huge number of victims would not have fallen.
The systematic political cover provided by the colonial West, led by the US, encourages Israel to continue its extermination war, which has wiped out all aspects of life in the Gaza Strip, and condemnation or sympathy for the victims is meaningless without a serious action.
AOHR UK called on all member states of the United Nations and international organisations to take immediate steps to ensure that international law is applied equally and justly, and to work on putting an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people by stopping the genocide, and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and all Palestinian territories, and ending the occupation.
