The army behaved just as it was expected to behave. That is exactly what is required of it. The chorus of international hypocrisy and self-righteousness that has arisen now after the killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers is doing an injustice to the Israel Defense Forces, and an even greater injustice to its thousands of other victims. What's the difference between one day and the next? What's the difference between one person who is killed and the next? What changed on Monday night with the attack on the seven aid workers?
Even Israel's promises of a thorough investigation are utterly ridiculous: What's there to investigate here – who gave the order? What difference does it make who gave that order – haven't there been innumerable orders like it during the war? Tens of thousands of orders to open fire to kill journalists, medical teams, people carrying white flags, people who have been uprooted and have nothing, and especially children and women.
Have you heard about the fields of death and destruction revealed in Haaretz by Yaniv Kubovich, the only military correspondent in Israel who has also revealed the details of the attack on the aid workers? This is the spirit of the IDF in this war, the only one. What's there to investigate?
There is no difference, none at all, between the attack on al-Shifa Hospital – which went on for two weeks and left hundreds of corpses in the dust and a hospital without one stone left standing on another – and the killing of the seven aid workers in their vehicle. In both cases the army knew it was going to harm innocent people, in both cases the justification was the Hamas members hiding, in both cases it was the humanitarian targets that are forbidden to be hit.
We will never know how many were killed at Shifa and how many of them really were terrorists, but it is perfectly clear that many of those who were killed were patients and people taking shelter in the hospital. Israel cheered this, and the world kept mum. What an excellent surgical operation, amid the piles of rubble of what had been a major medical center, the only one in the whole of the Gaza Strip.
Everyone also knows that the attack on the aid workers was unintentional, by mistake, an error – after all the IDF isn't like that, our soldiers aren't like that. Even when it is absolutely clear that there was no mistake here, nor any deviation from orders and procedures.
What the soldiers learned at Shifa, they also carried out at Deir al-Balah. Those who kept their mouths shut about Shifa would do well to keep their mouths shut about the World Central Kitchen. Even the ratios are similar: killing seven to obtain the head of one terrorist, whose identity and crime no one knows for sure. In any case, he was not in the car, neither he nor Yahya Sinwar.
The term "terrorist" is the most flexible one in Israel's lexicon. In the kill zones, it means any individual. Thus self-righteousness has come to Israel too. The prime minister has regretted the killing of the aid workers – why is he suddenly regretful, and about what exactly? The IDF chief of staff says that an error occurred – what error, with the firing of three rockets at three fully identified cars? And the IDF has investigated with the speed of light.
Topping them all was, oddly enough, food critic Ruti Rousso. Opinionated and very active in this war, giving aid to dislocated Israelis and the families of the hostages, Rousso had worked with the World Central Kitchen people who also operated in the Gaza border communities. "I am crushed," she wrote on X, and that of course is heartbreaking.
But the crushed Rousso is the very same person who wrote exactly three years ago on Twitter: "They are all Hamas. No one is uninvolved (apart from the animals there)."
What more can we say? If no one in Gaza is uninvolved, apart from the animals, it's good the IDF also killed Rousso's friends from the WCK. Or maybe their foreign blood is thicker than the thin, inferior blood of the Palestinians, and their race is superior?