A US-based aid group admitted Friday that a group of individuals — who the Israeli military says were armed — took control of an aid convoy in the southern Gaza Strip the day before, without the organization having vetted them or coordinated the matter with the Israel Defense Forces.
The military said Thursday that it struck the gunmen, killing them while not harming aid workers.
According to the IDF, Hamas operatives frequently try to hijack aid deliveries.
The IDF had said on Thursday that a convoy of aid trucks from the American Near East Refugee Aid (Anera) organization entered the southern Rafah area with Israeli coordination. It said that during the drive, it identified a group of gunmen taking over a vehicle at the front of the convoy and beginning to lead it. The IDF described the act as a hijacking attempt.
Shortly afterward, the IDF said it was able to determine that it could strike just the car with the gunmen, without harming the rest of the convoy, and so it carried out a strike, killing at least four.
I understand that a line has to be drawn somewhere, and frankly it doesn’t matter how far back either’s claim goes - there are significant numbers of Palestinians and Israelis who have only known the current boundaries and any changes fundamentally alter their identities. Sure, we can go into the genocides committed against the Jews in the region over the past 2000 years that expelled them from the area and gives cause to antisemites that call Jews “white”, or violence perpetrated by Europeans when breaking up the Ottoman Empire and stoking ethnic violence over the past 100. But those claims only matter to the extremists as wedge issues used to divide.
Extremists shouldn’t get to determine the future of millions who clearly want to live peacefully together. No one can bring back the murdered, but Israel, regional powers, the US, and European countries owe it to humanity to rebuild the destroyed cities in the same fashion that we intend to rebuild Ukraine.
The Jewish people were expelled from the area in 70 CE so Palestinians essentially lived there for almost 2000 years.