Guardian investigation details how IDF strike killed World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza
A new report reconstructs the events of 1 April 2024, when Israeli drone strikes killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza. It reveals communication failures between military units and decisions based on incomplete information.
On the night of 1 April 2024, a World Central Kitchen (WCK) team on Gaza's coast oversaw the unloading of a food shipment from a barge, using a makeshift jetty built with local contractors. The delivery had been coordinated with the Israeli army over several days, with an Israeli officer present to observe.
After delays in receiving final security clearance, the convoy of eight trucks and two WCK escort vehicles departed after nightfall. Along the route, two drones assigned to the IDF's Nahal brigade began tracking the convoy — a unit that, according to a later Australian government report, had not been fully briefed on the pre-coordinated mission.
At a WCK welcome centre, local guards were waiting, at least one armed, against WCK policy. Drone footage reportedly showed one guard firing a shot into the air. Nahal brigade officers concluded Hamas had hijacked the convoy, even though it went on to reach its destination, the WCK warehouse in Deir al-Balah, where the aid was unloaded.
The Israeli military prosecutor's account, published last month to justify closing the criminal case, omits the breakdown in communication between the army's humanitarian coordination body and the Nahal brigade. After unloading, WCK workers and the guards lingered briefly outside before separating — the guards heading north, the WCK convoy heading toward the coast and then south.
Over four minutes, between 23:09 and 23:13, all three WCK vehicles were struck roughly two minutes apart, killing seven workers from the UK, Australia, Poland, Palestine and the US. Nahal brigade chief of staff, reserve Col Nochi Mendel, said the workers were targeted because they had been near armed men, under a loosely defined practice of "incrimination" left to field commanders' discretion.
Mendel denied claims he ignored an order to halt strikes on humanitarian convoys that night, calling it fabricated. WCK said it was extraordinary that some in the IDF viewed its humanitarian work as hostile activity based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence, calling this an ongoing threat to aid workers everywhere.
