The Humanitarian Aid Shooting Galleries in Gaza

[justaprogressive]

Late in the evening of April 1, 2024, the anonymous poster behind popular Hebrew-language Telegram channel “Dead Terrorists” shared with its 124,000 followers a chaotic video of a fresh batch of corpses lying on the floor in an anonymous dark room. There was a pale-skinned man in blood-smeared khakis and body armor, eyes still half-open, a Polish passport perched on his breast; a woman in dirt-spattered body armor and a helmet with an Australian passport; and a younger man with thick eyebrows, a blood-streaked face, and no apparent body armor or passport.

A caption in Hebrew read: “Good morning everyone, good morning also to their helpers … pussies with foreign passports called ‘aid organizations’ (a code name for terrorists from Western countries) who obtained 72 virgins without mustaches and sent them in a coffin to their country of origin.” The caption went on to report that the dead Polish “Nazi” had joined “his ancestors, the soldiers of Adolf Hitler, deep in the toasters and ovens of hell.”

The corpses were humanitarian workers Damian Sobol, Zomi Frankcom, and Ayad Abutaha. Nochi Mandel, an Israeli army reservist colonel from the occupied West Bank, had ordered a subordinate to kill them and four colleagues—whose charred, unrecognizable remains lay in sheets alongside theirs—in precision drone strikes during the night. It quickly emerged that Mandel had nine weeks earlier signed an open letter to the War Cabinet, demanding members “do everything in your power” to prevent “humanitarian supplies and the operation of hospitals inside Gaza.” His division commander later told an Australian investigator he had explicitly warned Mandel earlier that evening, in a directive confirmed by his chief of staff, to refrain from bombing around humanitarian convoys that evening.

An analysis conducted by Al Jazeera and Forensic Architecture found more than 100 separate attacks on humanitarian convoys, warehouses, bakeries, and school distribution centers over the first 11 months of the Gaza onslaught. But Sobol, Frankcom, and Abutaha were not just any humanitarian workers; they were employees of World Central Kitchen, a trendy disaster relief nonprofit founded by a D.C. celebrity chef and personal friend of the Bidens whom Nancy Pelosi had just nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

https://prospect.org/world/2025-06-04-humanitarian-aid-shooting-galleries-gaza/

[Celerity]

1. K & R