Free Fire

An apparent Israeli air strike killed seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen who were distributing food supplies in the Gaza Strip in what the IDF is calling a "tragic incident". The IDF is already promising an investigation at the "highest ranks", but the facts already don't look good. The car carrying the workers was clearly marked (as one can see in the picture above), and the World Food Kitchen claims it was coordinating its movements with IDF officials.

"Despite coordinating movements with the IDF, the convoy was hit as it was leaving the Deir al-Balah warehouse, where the team had unloaded more than 100 tons of humanitarian food aid brought to Gaza on the maritime route," the [WCK] statement said.

"This is not only an attack against WCK, this is an attack on humanitarian organizations showing up in the most dire of situations where food is being used as a weapon of war. This is unforgivable," said World Central Kitchen CEO Erin Gore.

According to the statement, "the seven killed are from Australia, Poland, United Kingdom, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada and Palestine."

One thing this demonstrates is that the current apologia regarding the food situation in Gaza -- that it's not a supply problem, it's a distribution problem -- fails even on its own terms. "Distribution problems" are not acts of God; in this case, they plausibly emerge in significant part from the fact that the people doing the distributing have an alarming propensity to become targets for IDF strikes. If distribution requires security, and security requires people with some measure of military hardware (whether that be guns or armor or flak jackets), and IDF commanders are deciding that everybody bearing military hardware is a Hamas terrorist and is fair game to take a missile to the throat, well, small wonder food isn't being distributed.

That, in turn, underscores a larger point: this attack is only the latest in an avalanche of evidence demonstrating, at the very least, that the IDF's rules of operation seem unacceptably lax. The killing of three Israeli hostages by Israeli fire was perhaps the most obvious exemplifier of the problem, but it doesn't stand alone -- among other incidents, Israel also has been accused of targeting a "clearly identifiable" Reuters journalist with tank fire in Lebanon, and a Doctors Without Borders shelter whose "precise location" was known to military authorities. Haaretz reported this weekend on "free fire" zones that Israel has set up throughout the Gaza Strip, where essentially anyone who crosses the vicinity is deemed a valid military target and shot (this was what reportedly led to the hostages being killed -- they inadvertently crossed into one of these unmarked zones while fleeing their captors). The article suggests that some portion of the reported terrorist casualties Israel is reporting are derived from the uncorroborated assumption that anyone (or at least any military-aged male) killed in one of these free fire zones is a terrorist. As much as we hear about how we can't trust the "Hamas-run Health Ministry statistics" regarding the total number of Palestinian deaths (notwithstanding the fact that these figures have been born out in the past and Israel is not to my knowledge contesting them), we also have to take seriously the notion that right now, in this context and with this government, there is ample reason not to blindly trust Israeli figures and conclusions regarding casualty counts too.

And the conclusion that Israel is acting with cavalier indifference to civilian life is, perhaps, the most generous of the plausible inferences from the evidence. The alternative, of course, is that these attacks are not matters of recklessness but rather are deliberate. This does not require the implausible belief that Bibi has enacted some secret policy to kill all aid workers. It rather relies on the sadly not-implausible notion that some portion of midlevel and field commanders who've imbibed the drumbeat of "the media is the enemy, the NGOs are the enemy, everyone is the enemy, they're all conspiring against us" that is omnipresent in the right-wing press actually take that narrative seriously and are deciding to act on it. It doesn't take the entire army apparatus for this to be a problem -- just a few well-placed people who decide to take lines like "Al-Jazeera is a Hamas mouthpiece" seriously and literally, who feel secure in the knowledge that they'll never face meaningful consequence or punishment for their endeavors.

Either way, this cannot be allowed to continue. The Israeli government has nobody to blame but itself for putting itself in a position where an obviously just struggle against Hamas has become converted in the world's eyes into an indiscriminate pulverizing of the Palestinian people, because over and over again the evidence bears out that this is exactly what Israel has elected to do. Those choices were not inevitabilities, they were choices; and Israel has no cause for protest that it is being held responsible for those choices. It could have chosen differently. It opted not to. People are entitled to draw reasonable conclusions from the facts before their eyes.

Red Crescent Chief Complains of Hamas Firing From Their Hospitals

The Secretary General of the Red Crescent revealed that Hamas had deliberately fired rockets from Red Crescent medical facilities during the 2014 conflict, prompting retaliation from Israeli forces. Worse, he said that Hamas forces viewed the Red Crescent as spies or undercover agents, and fired upon staff as they were fleeing the area.

The news isn't exactly earth-shattering -- it's long been reported that Hamas used civilian and humanitarian shields during military operations -- but it is interesting both that this charge is now coming from top officials in the Red Crescent and being reported in Arab newspapers (the source about is the The National in the United Arab Emirates).


UPDATE: Elder of Ziyon gives some reasons to doubt the veracity of these reports. What a world we live in, where the UAE accuses Hamas of war crimes against Palestinians and a Zionist blogger throws cold water on the claims!

Gaza Aid Convoy Reportedly Attacked in International Waters

Reports are still sketchy, but the word is 2-3 dead after Israeli missile boats attempted to board ships trying to bring in various goods and aid to the Gaza Strip, in defiance of an Israeli blockade.

More as reports come in, and I don't want to prejudge when information is so scarce. But if this is what it sounds like, it is unacceptable behavior. You don't fire on an unarmed convoy, in international waters. I don't care how risible the Hamas regime that will receive the aid is, I don't care how suspect the motivations of the convoy organizers are, and I certainly don't think even justified fears over the misuse of cement, are good enough rationales to resort to a violent seizure. And I would bet that the (justified) international backlash over this will spell the end of the blockade anyway.

UPDATE: Okay, some new information coming in that sheds some additional light.
The IDF's official account of the incident is now up, the other main sources are here and here. Same caveats as above apply -- what we really have now are two sides to the story, not "the story".

1) The clashes apparently occurred on only one of the boats. Reports are that this boat represented a particular Turkish charity that was known as the most radical of the groups in the flotilla.

2) Israeli sources are claiming that the activists on the boat were armed with light weaponry (slingshots, clubs, bats, and knives, with conflicting reports about the possibility of pistols) and attacked the boarding commandos first. They're claiming they've got video to back up the assertion that the activists attacked the soldiers first, and soldiers fired back only to save fellow soldiers in mortal peril (and that these were the standing engagement orders for the operation).

I think this whole sequence of events can be broken down into several constituent parts. We can debate whether or not the flotilla was justified in trying to breach the blockade, rather than unloading in an Israeli port and transporting (most of) the goods by land. Even if we say they were not, we can still debate whether or not Israel was justified in commencing a boarding action to stop the flotilla. But again, even if they weren't, we can debate whether the activists had the right to violently resist the commandos. And finally, after that, we can ask whether the Israeli use of force was justified given that resistance.

Israel To Declare Unilateral Ceasefire

Good, and about time, though I don't know how long it will hold up. The "unilateral" part, paired with Israel saying it will still respond to rocket fire, seems to be a recipe for disaster. But progress is progress. The reason, I gather, Hamas is not joining the cease-fire at this time is contained in this statement:

Hamas has said a cease-fire alone is not enough.

"We are working in every direction so we can achieve our objectives in stopping the aggression, lifting the blockade, opening the crossings, and the compensation of our people and the rebuilding of the Gaza strip," said Hamas delegation spokesman Salah Bardwill.

I thought the whole point of people calling for a ceasefire was to put an immediate end to the devastation being wrought by the Gaza campaign, rather than tying it to other (legitimate, to be sure) political goals. If Israel had refused a ceasefire until it got a commitment from Hamas to recognize it as a state and cease all terrorist attacks, the war would have never ended.

Meanwhile, Israel has it's own set of delusions it's laboring under:

The senior official says he expects Olmert to announce a "cessation of military operations because we have achieved our goals both militarily on the ground and with our international partners,"

"Hamas' military machine has been substantially destroyed," the official added. "They have been given a sufficient deterrence that they will think twice before attacking again."

Are they serious? What in this operation might have possibly made Hamas even blink before attacking again? We already know they don't care for shit about Palestinian suffering (much less Israeli). The latest operation, bizarre notions to the contrary notwithstanding, isn't going to make Gazan residents love Israel more, and will undoubtedly create a host of new folks willing to attack Israel.

Maybe the capacity is reduced, but the will is as strong as ever. The military option -- whether it lasts one day, or thirty days, or three years, is inherently limited in what it can accomplish, because you can't in the modern world -- consistent with any modicum of human rights treatment -- prevent people from getting a hold of guns and launching attacks.

I'm not saying there is no role for military endeavors. But they aren't going to win the day -- at best they are dilatory. The folks who don't want Israel and Palestine to be at peace will never be rendered incapable of launching attacks, and their motivation will always be present because they know the fastest way to derail any emergent peace effort is to get the two sides fighting again and radicalizing yet another cadre of citizens on both sides.

Israel did seem to win a reasonably serious concession in a renewed effort to stop arms smuggling through tunnels on the Egyptian border. I think, though, that this victory has to be paired with a drastic increase in humanitarian aid admitted into Gaza -- indeed, a drastic increase in the humanitarian aid directed at Gaza, period. Things have to move fast: there are some things on the negotiating table that can wait awhile people bargain. Getting people food, water, jobs and electricity is not one of them. If Israel thinks Hamas has been truly incapacitated, then it must seize the moment to help get Gaza productive and on its feet, and encourage the international community to do likewise. Otherwise, we're going to be back where we started again.