UK, Australia, Canada Call Israel’s Decision ‘Shameful’

Gaza (GNP): Britain, Australia, and Canada have jointly condemned Israel’s decision not to pursue criminal investigations into the April 2024 airstrikes that killed seven humanitarian workers from World Central Kitchen, calling the move “shameful” in a joint statement issued this week.

The workers, who included nationals from all three countries, were killed while delivering food aid in Gaza, an attack that triggered international outrage at the time and continues to draw scrutiny more than two years later.

The joint statement described the decision as “too little, and too late,” arguing that the victims and their families deserve justice and accountability that has so far been denied. The three governments noted that the World Central Kitchen strike is just one of many incidents in Gaza where accountability has failed to materialize, adding that humanitarian workers continue operating in extremely dangerous conditions despite a fragile ceasefire. According to the statement, 186 humanitarian workers were killed in Gaza in 2025 alone, making it the deadliest environment in the world for aid delivery.

Reactions from individual governments echoed the joint statement’s tone. Australia’s government had already expressed outrage over the decision a day earlier, with relatives of Zomi Frankcom, the Australian aid worker killed in the strike, saying she deserved more than what they described as an opaque internal process that ended with the military clearing its own soldiers.

Israel’s ambassador to Australia, Hillel Newman, defended the decision publicly. Poland’s government separately voiced strong disappointment and called on Israeli authorities to cooperate with its own domestic investigation into the death of Damian Soból, a Polish volunteer also killed in the strike. In London, the Foreign Office said it was appalled on behalf of the families of the three British nationals killed in the attack.

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World Central Kitchen, which had operated food distribution efforts throughout the conflict, reiterated in a statement that it had coordinated the convoy’s movements with the military in advance and that the vehicles carried visible markings identifying them from the air. The organization said there had never been any justification for the strike and called the military’s account inconsistent with the full truth of what happened.

The Israeli military’s own explanation, issued earlier in the week, stated that individuals in the convoy had been mistaken for armed operatives and that the vehicles had deviated from their coordinated route. It concluded that the commanders’ decisions did not meet the threshold of reasonable suspicion for criminal misconduct, though two officers were removed from their positions and three others were reprimanded at the time.

One of the dismissed officers had reportedly signed an open letter earlier that year advocating that aid be withheld from Gaza altogether, a period during which restrictions on humanitarian assistance were widely documented and famine was formally declared in the territory in August 2025.

The controversy comes as the Israeli military separately acknowledged this week that its troops had fired on a car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and six family members in Gaza in 2024, announcing a criminal investigation into that killing as well as into the fatal shooting of fifteen paramedics the following year.

Rajab died after a prolonged phone call pleading for rescue, and while the military had previously denied troops were present near the incident, subsequent investigations pointed to nearby tanks as responsible. Officials have said that all such incidents are reviewed under obligations set out in international and domestic law, though observers note that criminal investigations into the killing of Palestinians have historically and rarely resulted in convictions.