Killing of USAID contractor in Gaza fuels internal protest
The death of Hani Jnena and his young family has intensified calls within the Biden administration to hold Israel’s military accountable for the war’s toll on humanitarian workers
Before he was killed alongside his wife and two children in Gaza last month, Hani Jnena, 33, sent a final message to his colleagues in the West Bank.
“My daughters are terrified, and I am trying to keep them calm, but this bombing is terrifying,” he wrote, referring to Israel’s campaign of airstrikes and artillery bombardment of the Palestinian enclave.
Jnena, a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, died along with his family when an Israeli airstrike hit Gaza City’s Al Sabra neighborhood on Nov. 5, according to a statement his employer provided to The Washington Post.
He is among hundreds of humanitarian and development workers killed during the two-month conflict, a statistic that has infuriated USAID officials who want the Biden administration to intensify pressure on Israel to limit the civilian bloodshed.
Already, 135 United Nations relief workers have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7. That’s more deaths than in any single conflict in the organization’s 78-year history, officials say. Outside of the U.N., prominent aid groups such as Save the Children also have suffered losses. On Tuesday, the group announced that a staff member, his four children, his wife, and many other members of his extended family of 28 were killed in an Israeli airstrike Dec. 10. Hamas killed at least 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 240 people hostage.
USAID officials, some of whom endorsed an open letter last month urging a cease-fire in Gaza, told The Post that the Biden administration should use its leverage to force a change in Israel’s behavior. That would include placing restrictions on the billions of dollars in military assistance the United States provides to Israel every year. “We’ve seen far too much inaction from the White House and USAID leadership on this issue,” said one USAID official, who like some others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss disagreements with U.S. policy.
An Israel Defense Forces representative said Israel could not confirm or deny responsibility for killing Jnena when only given the day, neighborhood and names of the USAID contractor and his family.
“In response to Hamas’ barbaric attacks, the IDF is operating to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities,” said the representative. “In stark contrast to Hamas’ intentional attacks on Israeli men, women and children, the IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.”
Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden administration official who worked at USAID under President Barack Obama, said U.S. efforts to reduce the violence in Gaza have been insufficient.
“The U.S. concern about these casualties remains almost purely rhetorical. There is no policy leverage being put behind it whatsoever,” said Konyndyk, president of Refugees International. “Beyond expressing concern and expressing regret, that’s where it stops.”
The White House says it works hard to pressure the Israelis to take a more targeted approach in its military campaign in Gaza, and claims credit for persuading Israel to allow food and medicine into the territory. But distributing that aid requires humanitarian workers — a group of professionals who have been killed in ever-greater numbers as the war continues.
“It’s not just rhetorical,” said a White House spokesman. “We have raised our concerns about humanitarian workers being killed and development workers being killed directly to the Israelis at very high levels on many occasions.”
It was a result of U.S. pressure, the official said, that Israel established a system allowing aid workers to share coordinates and locations of where they are operating.
But Israel has conducted airstrikes inside the supposedly safer areas established by this system, the official conceded, causing chaos and confusion among aid workers. In those instances, “we’ve expressed our concern to Israel that they are taking strikes in deconfliction areas,” the official said.
Another weakness of the system are the frequent electricity and internet blackouts in Gaza, which prevent aid workers from being able to transmit their coordinates or locate deconfliction areas. In past instances, the U.S. government has instructed Israel to limit communications blackouts, but the White House official did not say whether that was the case for the latest series of blackouts in Gaza on Thursday and Friday.
The leaders of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations recently co-wrote an essay calling the situation in Gaza incomparable to any other conflict or natural disaster they have experienced.
“The aerial bombardments have rendered our jobs impossible,” the leaders of groups including Oxfam America, Mercy Corps. and Save the Children wrote in the New York Times. “The withholding of water, fuel, food and other basic goods has created an enormous scale of need that aid alone cannot offset.”
Besides frustration directed at the White House, several USAID employees expressed disappointment that the killing of Jnena was not acknowledged by the agency publicly or in internal staff-wide communication. USAID Administrator Samantha Power has been aware of his death since at least late November, when she sent a letter to the CEO of the USAID contractor he worked for, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.
“On behalf of USAID, please accept my deepest condolences for the loss of Hani Jnena, his wife, and two daughters,” Power wrote to CEO Carrie Hessler-Radelet. “I understand that Hani was a tireless advocate for the people he served in Gaza — working long hours and sacrificing time away from his family to help communities access clean water. He was a true humanitarian — someone who dedicated himself to helping people in their time of great need.”
A spokeswoman for Power, Jessica Jennings, said the USAID community “grieves the deaths of the innocent civilians and many humanitarian workers who have been killed in this conflict, including courageous individuals like Hani Jnena, who worked for a USAID implementing partner and was killed alongside his family.”
During a recent visit to the El Arish airport in Egypt, where U.S. military planes have delivered tens of thousands of pounds of food and medical supplies destined for Gaza, Power noted that the conflict has become the “deadliest in history for U.N. aid workers.”
“Despite this, thousands of U.N. staff continue to report for work each and every day. They are the backbone of the humanitarian response,” she said.
When asked whether Power raised the killing of Jnena with Israel officials, USAID did not say, but Jennings said that in “every conversation we are having with the government of Israel, we raise the absolute need for humanitarian workers to be able to safely distribute assistance and for civilians to be able to access assistance.”
In a statement, Jnena’s employer said that on the day he and his family were killed, they were staying with Jnena’s in-laws in Gaza City. “The family had recently sought safety there after fleeing airstrikes in their own neighborhood of Al Sheikh in Gaza City,” the organization said. “His in-laws were killed as well.”