Zomi Frankcom was killed by IDF drones. Australia says Israel’s response ‘falls far short’. How did it happen and what’s next?

“Serious failures in the process” was the euphemism of Israel’s military advocate general to describe a 2024 drone strike that killed an Australian aid worker.

“An insult to my sister’s memory,” says Zomi Frankcom’s grieving brother.

More than two years on from Frankcom’s death, there is no closure. From the perspective of her family, no justice.

Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, 43, was killed when an aid convoy in which she was travelling, bringing food to the war-ravaged people of Gaza, was hit by three drone strikes, intentionally fired over four minutes into three vehicles.

Frankcom was an experienced humanitarian, she had worked across Asia, north Africa, the Americas and the Middle East.

Her employer, the World Central Kitchen, was similarly credentialed. It had operated in war-ravaged Gaza for months of intense conflict, and closely coordinated what aid it could deliver with the arm of the Israeli ministry of defence which controlled everything that went in and out of the occupied territory.

Permission to move from the IDF had been slow to come through, and it was after 11pm when the three vehicles – each marked with the WCK logo on their roofs – turned south on to the coast road, heading for Rafah.

Between 11:09pm and 11:13pm, strikes from IDF drones hit all three vehicles in steady succession, each strike about two minutes apart. Survivors from the first vehicles ran in fear to the surviving cars, before they too were annihilated in turn.

Seven aid workers were killed, probably one in the first vehicle, two in the second, four in the third. They were from Australia, the UK, Poland, Palestine and America.

“There was a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip,” the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said at the time. “This happens in wartime.”

The World Central Kitchen saw it very differently.

“This is not only an attack against WCK, this is an attack on humanitarian organisations showing up in the most dire of situations where food is being used as a weapon of war. This is unforgivable,” the chief executive, Erin Gore, said.

The IDF conducted a rapid investigation of the attacks, characterising the decision to repeatedly strike the aid convoy as a “grave mistake”, but said there was no intentional harm.

“Those who approved the strike were convinced that they were targeting Hamas operatives and not WCK employees.”

In its public statement on the attacks, the IDF said it had not been told of the presence of an armed guard with the convoy before it started moving, and that that guard had been wrongly identified as a Hamas fighter who had taken the convoy hostage.

The IDF also said the convoy had deviated from its previously agreed route.

Notwithstanding “serious failures” that led to the killings, “the decisions of the commanders did not raise reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct,” the IDF said.

Within 72 hours of the strikes, the two Israeli officers responsible for the strike were identified and removed from their posts.

It was later reported the most senior of those officers, Col Nochi Mendel, was a West Bank settler who, earlier in 2024, had signed an open letter with more than 100 other IDF officers and commanders, imploring that aid to Gaza be cut off.

The letter, sent to the Israeli War Cabinet and the IDF chief of staff, urged those to “do everything in your power” not to allow “humanitarian supplies and the operation of hospitals inside Gaza City”.

Australia responded to the attack on the aid convoy with fury.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, described Frankcom’s killing, alongside those of her colleagues, as “completely unacceptable”, saying they were undertaking “extraordinarily important work” and should have been protected.

The former chief of the defence force, retired air chief marshal Mark Binskin, was charged with investigating the circumstances of the attack. He visited Israel between 5 and 13 May 2024, just over a month after the attack.

He reported constructive engagement from Israeli authorities, including interviews with senior IDF officials. He was shown 90 minutes of unedited drone footage from the night of the attack. He was shown that footage without sound.

Binskin reported to government: “it is my assessment that the IDF strike on the WCK aid workers was not knowingly or deliberately directed against the WCK”.

He said it was likely the presence of armed, locally contracted, security personnel on the convoy, of which the IDF had not been notified ahead of its movement, as well as the failure within the IDF to properly disseminate information around the convoy’s movements, led to a “significant break-down in situational awareness”.

Binskin said the Israeli government should apologise to the families of those innocents it killed.

‘Far short of accountability’

Binskin delivered his report in early August of 2024. It was more than two years later, that the Israel Defense Forces’ military advocate general cleared the officers and soldiers of any criminal wrongdoing.

In a statement, the IDF said its officers “mistakenly believed that the vehicles contained Hamas military operatives and therefore struck the vehicles”.

“It was determined that, notwithstanding serious failures in the process that led to the assessment that Hamas operatives were travelling in the vehicles, the decisions of the commanders did not raise reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct,” the IDF said.

Australia’s response, again, was frustration and rage.

“Israel’s decision falls far short of the accountability we expect,” the foreign minister, Penny Wong, said.

“Democracies seek and accept higher standards. The Australian government will continue to keep pressing Israel for justice for Zomi and her colleagues.”

But Israel’s ambassador to Australia, Hillel Newman – summoned by Wong for what has been described as a “dressing-down” – was steadfast in his defence of Israel’s process. He said he felt “deep sorrow” for the victims and those who loved them, but refused to apologise.

Asked about the Australian government’s, and people’s, demands for justice, Newman asked “What does it mean: justice? Lynch people on the street?”

“No. Justice is that’s why you have a court. A court measures what happened and comes to a decision.”

Zomi Frankcom’s grieving brother Mal had just been in Canberra to mark World Humanitarian Day – memorialising “those who have lost their lives while helping others” – when the news of Israel’s finding was announced.

He and the foreign minister had just announced an award in his sister’s honour.

The finding and its timing was, he said: “an insult to my sister’s memory”.

“We and the families of the six other World Central Kitchen aid workers have been waiting for justice for over two years, hoping and calling for an independent criminal investigation,” he said.

“Zomi and her colleagues deserve more than an internal, opaque process that ends with a short statement by the Israeli military absolving their soldiers of criminal wrongdoing.

“The families of the victims deserve transparency … for the international humanitarian law violations that took place on that day.”