IDF officer sacked over killing of aid workers was a settler who had called for ‘siege’ of Gaza

The most senior IDF commander dismissed for his role in the drone strike which killed seven aid workers in Gaza is a settler – who in January signed an open letter calling for the Palestinian territory to be deprived of aid.

A senior lawyer said its contents – including a call for a “siege” of Gaza City – should be considered by the Israeli authorities investigating the killings.

Colonel Nochi Mandel was one of two officers dismissed last week following the relentless drone attack on three vehicles belonging to the World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity. The attack continued until the Israelis had killed all the charity workers.

An investigation by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) said the strikes were a “grave mistake” but concluded there was no intentional harm.

“Those who approved the strike were convinced that they were targeting armed Hamas operatives and not WCK employees,” it said.

In the January letter, Col Mandel – a religious nationalist who lives in a illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank – along with more than 130 other reserve officers and commanders, called for the flow of aid into Gaza to be restricted.

The letter was sent on January 20 to the Israeli war cabinet and the IDF chief of staff and asked them to “do everything in your power” not to allow “humanitarian supplies and the operation of hospitals inside Gaza City” following its evacuation.

The idea was to lay siege to the area until the estimated 130 Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza were returned.

“As far as we understand … it is permissible and legal according to the laws of armed conflict, to impose a siege on a certain area, on the condition that the citizens who are in it are allowed evacuation corridors,” the letter adds.

Michael Mansfield, KC, one of Britain’s leading barristers, said the letter should “absolutely” be considered by the Israelis investigating the incident.

“The document is plainly relevant to a particular state of mind,” said Mr Mansfield. “In other words it is not indicating that the target of the Israeli army is primarily Hamas, but Gaza as a whole – by weaponising aid under siege conditions.

“Those who will inevitably suffer and run the risk of death as a result are bound to be non-combatant civilians, medics, women, children, the injured and those who are responsible for bringing aid, as with the seven killed.”

Although the IDF has concluded its probe, a judicial inquiry is ongoing to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against those involved in the airstrike.

Col Mandel is the highest ranking officer to have been dismissed in connection to the airstrikes. In 2007, he was named in the Israeli media as one of the IDF’s “ten most promising religious officers”.

The son of a Holocaust survivor, he lives in Gush Etzion, a cluster of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In his youth, he studied at a religious school run by the Ateret Cohanim, a right-wing Jewish organisation dedicated to “returning, reclaiming, and rebuilding a United Jerusalem”.

Since 2000, the organisation has been acquiring land in the Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem outside the Old City.

The investigation into Col Mandel and his colleagues was led by retired Major General Yoav Har-Even, president and CEO of Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, sparking claims of bias.

The IDF is one of Rafael’s biggest buyers. The company, which sells nearly half of its arms to Israeli clients, makes the ‘Spike missiles’ which are reported to have been used to kill the aid workers.

“We demand the creation of an independent commission to investigate the killings of our WCK colleagues”, said WCK in the wake of the IDF report last week. “The IDF cannot credibly investigate its own failure in Gaza”.

The IDF investigation report, which runs to 539 words, identified three key errors it said led to the strike:

On the eve of its publication, a briefing was given to a small group of foreign journalists by Maj Gen Har-Even but key questions were left unanswered.

Chief among them is how it was possible the drone team did not know the vehicles belonged to WCK and why it was thought a gunman had got into one of the cars.

“I think it’s inconceivable that the IDF wasn’t aware that the three vehicles were being driven by the WCK aid workers,” said Charlie Herbert, a former major general in the British Army who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The alleged failure to realise the cars belonged to WCK is perplexing for a number of reasons but mainly because the entire WCK operation had been approved in advance by the IDF and had been tracked for hours, almost certainly days, by the IDF and its drones.

The IDF said the vehicle’s roof markings were not visible to its drones at night. But the drones had tracked the WCK aid convoy from the beach, where the supplies had been landed on a pier built a few weeks before under the glare of world media attention.

The trucks were then tracked all the way to WCKs warehouse in Deir al Balah, according to the IDF.

The same journey had been made the previous day and several times before. Each journey was approved by and closely monitored by the IDF.

“The IDF has acknowledged that our teams followed all proper communications procedures”, said WCK in a statement. “The IDF’s own video fails to show any cause to fire on our personnel convoy, which carried no weapons and posed no threat”.

On the day of the strikes, it was Colonel Mandel’s brigade that was embedded on the ground in the area and was tracking the convoy. IDF protocol demands that one or more of its officers would have been in live radio contact with the teams flying the drones above.

It is known with certainty the IDF knew the convoy belonged to WCK as it moved from the beach to the WCK warehouse.

This is because Major General Har-Even told journalists that the military had called WCK’s US office to tell them a gunman had clambered onto one of the trucks at the time.

As Eylon Levy, until recently an Israeli government spokesman, has said on social media, it is “normal” for armed gunmen to clamber onto the top of aid trucks in Gaza.

While the aid was unloaded at the warehouse, the two drones kept circling, according to the IDF. Once the aid was stowed, four SUV vehicles were observed by the drone emerging from the WCK warehouse.

One vehicle headed north and the drones watched as the aid workers got into the three remaining WCK vehicles to return home for the night.

At this point, said Major General Har-Even in his briefing, someone watching the video feed from one of the drones said they thought one of the people getting into one of the vehicles was carrying a weapon.

However, when the video was rerun for the investigators there was no sign of that.

“No footage of this moment was provided”, reported the BBC from the briefing. “But the military investigation concluded that it was a “misclassification… they saw that it’s a rifle but at the end of the day it was a bag.”

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