Israeli military fires two senior officers as report finds strike on aid workers was in ‘serious violation of commands’

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The IDF fired two senior officers and reprimanded a top commander as it admitted a catalog of failures in a drone strike on an aid convoy in Gaza, including that it killed aid workers who had survived an initial attack.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Friday that “those who approved the strike were convinced that they were targeting armed Hamas operatives,” calling the attack “a grave mistake stemming from a serious failure due to a mistaken identification.”
It said the strike was carried out in “serious violation of the commands and IDF Standard Operating Procedures,” and dismissed a major and a colonel in reserve. Three other IDF officials were formally reprimanded: the commanders of the brigade and division involved, and the commander of the Southern Command, who bore “overall responsibility.”
Seven aid workers – three Britons, a Palestinian, a US-Canadian dual citizen, an Australian and a Pole – were killed in Monday’s strikes on cars operated by the World Central Kitchen (WCK), setting off fury in those countries.
 
The IDF detailed in its preliminary findings a series of botched assessments and decision-making failures that led to the targeted strikes on three cars carrying innocent aid workers.
Its forces “identified a gunman on one of the aid trucks, following which they identified an additional gunman,” the IDF said, as the trucks transported food to a warehouse in Gaza. It did not provide any more details about that claim.
Later, as three WCK vehicles left the warehouse, a commander “mistakenly assumed that the gunmen were located inside the accompanying vehicles and that these were Hamas terrorists,” the report said.
The IDF officers involved “misidentified something slung over one of the passenger’s shoulders as a weapon,” but forces now believe it was a bag, an IDF spokesperson told CNN Friday.
The spokesperson also said that Israel’s surveillance drones “could not see the WCK logo on the vehicles at night.”
Some of the WCK workers in the first car survived the initial strike and fled to the next car in the convoy, the spokesperson added, only for that vehicle to also be targeted.
WCK and the heads of many Western nations have called for an independent, third party investigation into the strikes, but Israel has committed only to the internal inquiry released Friday.