Israel has doubled down in rejecting a substantive foreign probe second-guessing its own external investigation of the World Central Kitchen (WCK) incident in which the IDF disastrously mistakenly killed seven humanitarian aid workers on April 1.
This is the repeated message of multiple IDF and Defense Ministry sources to The Jerusalem Post, despite conflicting reports by KAN News and Channel 12.
The Prime Minister’s Office declined to respond to the Post’s request for a comment.
It appears that the discrepancy in the reports involves the agenda of some to broadcast Israel’s transparency and openness to seriously probing the issues involved, while others want to emphasize that the IDF’s own system for probing is second to none and trustworthy.
Multiple Israeli sources said the probe’s leader, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems CEO Yoav Har Even, a former IDF major-general, has been outside of the IDF for some time and beyond the chain of command, dispelling any concerns about whitewashing to achieve promotions, such as by officers still in uniform.
On a practical level, Channel 12 only reported that Israel is sharing its written findings with the WCK and related parties, something the IDF essentially already did.
Israel and the IDF are not permitting WCK or any foreign parties direct access to any IDF officers involved in the incident, a basic minimum requirement for performing a true probe that could seriously second-guess the IDF.
This does not mean that WCK and others may not perform their own probes and issue conclusions harsher against the IDF and Israel than what the IDF published last Friday. The main difference between any foreign probe and the IDF probe would be worldviews, since any foreign probe will not actually have the access to key officials that the IDF probe had.
So far, WCK, the US, and others have said even if the IDF probe was serious, it did not by itself ensure that future such incidents might not occur and did not fully explain some of Israel’s slowing aspects of humanitarian aid.
IDF has completely withdrawn from southern Gaza
While Israel bragged about getting 100 to 200 trucks of aid per day into Gaza prior to the incident since US President Joe Biden gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an ultimatum last Thursday, the IDF has quickly found ways to get more than 400 trucks per day into Gaza, the critics say.
Officially, the IDF said it would add special stickers to the roofs of aid trucks so that drones could always identify them, a key problem in the WCK incident. But avoiding such incidents might be helped by the IDF’s near freeze in Gaza operations since Sunday.
Although the IDF is still carrying out some operations in northern and central Gaza, they are much smaller, and the military has withdrawn completely from southern Gaza, for now.