Throughout its six-month war on the Gaza Strip, Israel has been accused of using food as a weapon.
“The extent of Israel’s continued restrictions on entry of aid into Gaza, together with the manner in which it continues to conduct hostilities, may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime,” United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said last month.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has likewise accused Israel of using food as a “weapon of war.”
This week’s killing of several foreign aid workers by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has supercharged existing concerns around Israel’s alleged constriction of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, where a near-total blockade and six months of an excoriating IDF offensive have prompted a humanitarian crisis and warnings of imminent famine.
Seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) staff—including one American—were killed in a series of IDF drone strikes on their convoy earlier this week. The workers had been delivering food along a route pre-agreed with the IDF. WCK founder José Andrés said his staff were targeted “systematically, car by car.”
IDF Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi called the incident “a grave mistake” that “followed a misidentification at night, during a war, in very complex conditions.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was “a tragic event in which our forces unintentionally harmed non-combatants in the Gaza Strip.”
However the strike occurred, the effect on the already-scant humanitarian inflows has been immediate. WCK and several other NGOs announced a pause in all Gaza operations, with a WCK spokesperson telling Newsweek that all of the organization’s ships had returned to Cyprus, from where it has been delivering food by sea to Gaza. “A determination has not yet been made about when to resume operations in Gaza,” the spokesperson said.
More than 180 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since October, the Associated Press reported citing United Nations figures. The dire humanitarian situation in the impoverished Gaza Strip is being exacerbated by continued Israeli action. Food—or the lack thereof—has been a bloody flashpoint in recent months.
President Joe Biden said he was “outraged and heartbroken” by the killing of the WCK workers this week. "Even more tragically, this is not a stand-alone incident,” the president said.
“This is a major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult—because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians. Incidents like yesterday's simply should not happen. Israel has also not done enough to protect civilians.”
But the U.S. shows no sign of pairing its political pressure on Israel with a freeze on or reduction of military aid for the IDF. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told journalists at a Wednesday briefing that the president’s intervention "was a statement about this incident. But it’s not a change in policy.”
The U.S., Miller added, is still pushing Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza and do more to protect aid workers and Palestinian civilians.
