Israel strikes aid convoy organized by U.S. humanitarian group, killing 5

The convoy had been delivering medical supplies and fuel to an Emirati-run hospital in Rafah, Palestine Country Director Sandra Rasheed said in the statement to The Washington Post, and its route was coordinated with the Israel Defense Forces.

“The convoy included an Anera employee who was fortunately unharmed,” she added.

The deadly strike in southern Gaza on Thursday comes just days after a World Food Program truck was fired on in the enclave and amid an increasingly strained environment in which humanitarian organizations are operating.

In its account of the incident, the IDF said the gunmen had seized the lead vehicle of the convoy, prompting the attack.

“During the convoy’s journey, armed militants took control of a vehicle at the front of the convoy,” the IDF said. “An attack was carried out against them. No other vehicles in the convoy were harmed, and it reached its destination as planned.”

The IDF said the “attack on the militants removed the threat to the humanitarian convoy,” adding that “the presence of armed militants within a humanitarian convoy without coordination is against regulations, complicates the security of the convoys and their personnel, and thus undermines the humanitarian effort in Gaza.”

Humanitarian groups providing desperately needed aid in Gaza have repeatedly come under attack during the war, raising concerns about the system used to coordinate routes and the IDF’s approach to the conflict. According to the United Nations, more than 280 humanitarian workers have been killed since the war in Gaza began in October.

Seven World Central Kitchen aid workers were killed in an Israeli airstrike in April, making global headlines. Israeli forces at the time also believed, incorrectly, that militants were present in the convoy.

An Anera employee, Mousa Shawwa, a logistics coordinator in Gaza, was killed on March 8 by an Israeli airstrike while he was in a deconflicted shelter, the charity’s CEO Sean Carroll told The Washington Post at the time. The relief worker’s 6-year-old son, Karim, also died 10 days later from injuries suffered during the attack, he said.

Thursday’s incident is one of several such attacks this week. In remarks to the United Nations Security Council on Thursday, the U.S. representative, Robert Wood, referred to an incident that occurred on Sunday, according to U.N. officials, in which he said the IDF fired toward a UNICEF vehicle.

On Tuesday, at least 10 bullets were fired into a World Food Program vehicle, which the United Nations blamed on Israel and prompted WFP to temporarily suspend staff movement across Gaza. Wood said the Biden administration was “deeply alarmed” by Tuesday’s shooting and urged Israel to “immediately rectify the issues within their system that allowed this to happen.”

Mercy Corps vice president of global policy and advocacy, Kate Phillips-Barrasso, said in a statement that Tuesday’s attack “underscores the dangerous reality that aid workers are not safe in Gaza.”

This week, the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs known said in an update that almost 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been placed under evacuation orders from Israel’s military, squeezing Palestinians into overcrowded areas “lacking critical infrastructure and basic services.” OCHA added that “delivering fuel and medical supplies to health facilities is extremely challenging in the context of repeated evacuation orders.”

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The World Health Organization said Israel has agreed to successive “humanitarian pauses” in military operations in Gaza beginning Sunday, to allow more than 640,000 children to be given oral polio vaccinations after an outbreak of the virus. The pauses, from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., will last for at least three days in three separate zones, beginning in central Gaza and then moving to the south and the north, according to the WHO.

Israel’s massive military incursion in the West Bank continued Friday, with the IDF announcing early Friday morning that it had struck a “terrorist cell” in Jenin. The operation has lasted for several days, during which at least 16 people have been killed, according to Israeli authorities and Palestinian health officials.

Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN in an interview that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” while also stressing Israel’s right to defend itself. In her first major interview since she rose to the top of the Democratic ticket, she did not fully answer whether she would be open to withholding U.S. weapons shipments to Israel should she be elected president, instead pointing to her work with President Joe Biden to secure a cease-fire and hostage deal.

At least 40,602 ​​people have been killed and 93,855 injured in Gaza since the war started, according to the Gaza Health Ministry on Thursday. It does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, including more than 300 soldiers, and it says 339 soldiers have been killed since the start of its military operations in Gaza.