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 on 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 said.
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”.
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 — .
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.
Israel’s military began its Gaza offensive in response to the October 7 attack last year in which Hamas fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and seized more than 250 hostages.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 44,382 people in Gaza, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry.
