The tragic killing of the seven aid workers in Gaza in an IDF drone strike has undoubtedly changed the direction of Israel’s war against Hamas.

After the IDF admitted to making “grave mistakes” in the strike on a World Central Kitchen (WCK) vehicle convoy, pressure has piled on Israel to agree to an immediate ceasefire in the Strip, as well as other unpalatable terms Hamas put forward.

In the immediate aftermath, Israel dismissed two military officers and reprimanded several others.

The point that has been ignored by the vast majority of media pundits and politicians as they line up to criticize Israel is that holding up the WCK incident as proof there must be an immediate ceasefire is tantamount to saying that Hamas should stay in power.

Some of the harshest criticism leveled at Israel has come from its staunchest allies, including the United States and the United Kingdom, which have previously stopped short of calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

The UK’s foreign minister, Lord David Cameron, for example, warned that Britain’s support for Israel was “not unconditional,” while describing the deaths of the WCK workers as “tragic and avoidable.”

Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden released a statement on April 2 — mere hours after the incident — which called for a “thorough investigation” that brings full “accountability.”

“Even more tragically, this is not a stand-alone incident. This conflict has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed,” the statement added.

Such criticism was mirrored in the international press.

An editorial by The Observer argued that “only a ceasefire in Gaza can save [Israel] from its worst-ever crisis” and called for an “independent, international inquiry into last week’s outrageous killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers.”

“The IDF’s internal investigation and its limited admission of error do not begin to excuse or explain the army’s trigger-happy behaviour and ongoing, systemic problems with targeting,” it added.

Writing in The Guardian, Nesrine Malik described the World Central Kitchen incident as evidence that “Israel has gone rogue.”

The Wall Street Journal attempted to explore what it called the “deadly mistakes of Israel’s military in Gaza,” in a piece that observed how the aid convoy strike had “crystallized a broad international backlash against Israel’s war in Gaza.”

However, the swift and unforgiving reaction to the WCK incident by both international leaders and the media has exposed another issue: a glaring hypocrisy where Israel is judged by a standard that is not applied to its allies.

Opinion writer Brendan O’Neill was among the handful of media pundits to call out this double standard in a piece for The Spectator:

David Cameron has got some front. The Foreign Secretary is haranguing Israel over its tragic unintentional killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, and yet he oversaw a war in which such ‘friendly fire’ horrors were commonplace. In fact, more than seven people were slain in accidental bombings under Cameron’s watch.

It was the Libya intervention of 2011. In that Nato-led excursion, in which Cameron, then prime minister, was an enthusiastic partner, numerous Libyans died as a result of misaimed bombs. Things got so bad that the West’s allies took to painting the roofs of their vehicles bright pink in an effort to avoid Nato’s missiles.”

Another op-ed in Newsweek by international human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky and urban warfare expert John Spencer noted how one inevitable consequence of war is that “errors will occur” and that the US too had made similar errors during its conflicts:

The United States itself, during its withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, mistakenly killed an aid worker and nine members of his family—including seven children—after targeting the wrong vehicle in a Kabul drone strike.

Similarly, NATO members have also, inadvertently and mistakenly, killed civilians, as in Libya in 2011, when 13 people, including ambulance workers, were killed by so-called ‘friendly fire.’

A piece published in The Daily Mail by columnist Richard Littlejohn called out the “nauseating” double standards that the WCK strike has exposed.

Recounting the events that followed the death of his friend, ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd — who was killed alongside several other journalists in a US strike on their clearly marked vehicle on the outskirts of Basra, Iraq, in March 2003 — Littlejohn wrote:

A subsequent inquest ruled that Terry had been unlawfully killed by American troops and his lawyer said he had been the victim of a ‘very serious war crime‘. No one was ever charged.

The shock of his death was as traumatic for his family and friends as for those of the three brave British aid workers killed by Israeli forces in Gaza this week.

But no one at the time demanded that the American-led Coalition — which included 46,000 British military personnel — withdraw immediately from Iraq, allow Saddam Hussein to remain in power and abandon the hunt for what turned out to be non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Every innocent person killed in this war is a tragedy, whether they are international aid workers or Palestinian civilians. However, suggesting that Israel’s tragic accidents are somehow unique or more severe than others is hypocrisy of the highest order.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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