World Central Kitchen suspends Gaza operations after Israel kills three contractors

By AFP

US charity World Central Kitchen said Saturday it was "pausing operations in Gaza" after an Israeli air strike killed three of its contractors, including one who Israel's military said was involved in Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack.

Earlier Saturday, Gaza civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that five people were killed, including "three employees of World Central Kitchen", in the strike in the main southern city of Khan Yunis.

"The three in the car were contractors of ours," WCK told AFP Saturday evening.

The Israeli military had previously said that a Palestinian working for WCK was killed, accusing the individual of being a "terrorist" who "infiltrated Israel and took part in the murderous October 7 massacre" last year.

WCK said in a statement that it "had no knowledge that any individual in the vehicle had alleged ties to the October 7 Hamas attack".

It also told AFP the car had not been marked with the WCK logo, contradicting Bassal's earlier comments.

The Israeli army had said its strike in Khan Yunis targeted "a civilian unmarked vehicle and its movement on the route was not coordinated for transporting of aid".

The Israeli army statement said representatives from the unit responsible for overseeing humanitarian needs in Gaza had "demanded senior officials from the international community and the WCK administration to clarify the issue and order an urgent examination regarding the hiring of workers who took part in the October 7 massacre".

In April, an Israeli strike killed seven WCK staff -- an Australian, three Britons, a North American, a Palestinian and a Pole.

Israel said it had been targeting a "Hamas gunman" in that strike, but the military admitted a series of "grave mistakes" and violations of its own rules of engagement.

The UN said last week that 333 aid workers had been killed since the start of the war in October of last year, 243 of them employees of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

Palestinian militants' October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,207 people, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel's retaliatory military offensive has killed 44,382 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to figures from the territory's health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.