If anything, Israel has treated its tragic error with greater severity than the U.S. did its own.
“A tragic mistake.”
“Nobody wants to see that happen.”
“It is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died . . . were a direct threat.”
These comments from U.S. officials do not describe Israel’s tragic error in killing seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen in Gaza on Monday. Rather, they describe another tragic error: America’s own, in launching a drone strike in August 2021 that killed ten civilians, including an aid worker and seven children, in Kabul, in the chaotic aftermath of the Abbey Gate terror attack.
Those heaping opprobrium on Israel and pointing to their horrible mistake — which it was, despite ghastly insinuations that the IDF sought to kill aid workers — would do well to remember that the United States, during the Biden administration, similarly committed an awful act it did not intend to commit. And that absence of intent continues to be, Mr. Blinken, what “distinguishes” Hamas from those fighting the group whose members openly delighted in slaughtering innocents and heightening their suffering.
Israel has treated its lapses with greater severity than the U.S. did its own, as Noah Rothman notes on the homepage. Israel on Friday said an investigation determined that the strike resulted from “a serious failure due to a mistaken identification” and “errors in decision-making.” Two officers involved will be dismissed from their posts.
By contrast, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin decided not to punish military personnel over the botched 2021 strike. As spokesman John Kirby put it clinically at the time, “I do not anticipate there being issues of personal accountability to be had with respect to the August 29th airstrike.” The U.S. military evidently thought it was tracking an ISIS-K car at the time of the strike but was actually tracking an Afghan aid worker, who had been trying to get a visa for himself and his family to go to America. Relatives later said that children had rushed to greet him in the courtyard, before the strike.
A horror, unthinkable. As now, a tragic mistake that nothing, including the invention of wicked intent by those responsible, will ever make right.