A secret report by Israeli military police investigators explains how a tragic series of mistakes by Israel’s air force naval and intelligence officers led to an airstrike in which four Palestinian boys playing on a beach in Gaza in 2014 were killed by missiles launched from an armed drone.
According The Intercept testimony from the officers involved in the attack which has been concealed from the public until now confirms for the first time that the children — four cousins aged 10 and 11 — were pursued and killed by drone operators who allegedly mistook them in broad daylight for Hamas militants.
The testimony raises new questions about whether the attack which unfolded in front of dozens of journalists and triggered global outrage was carried out with reckless disregard for civilian life and without proper authorization.
After killing the first boy the drone operators told investigators they had sought clarification from their superiors as to how far along the beach used by civilians they could pursue the fleeing survivors. Less than a minute later as the boys ran for their lives the drone operators decided to launch a second missile killing three more children despite never getting an answer to their question.
Suhad Bishara a lawyer representing the families of the victims told The Intercept that Israel’s use of armed drones to kill Palestinians poses “many questions concerning human judgment ethics and compliance with international humanitarian law.”
Remotely piloted bombers “alter the process of human decision-making” Bishara said and the use of the technology in the 2014 beach attack “expands the circle of people responsible for the actual killing of the Bakr children.”
The Israeli military police report on the 2014 strike seen by The Intercept offers the most direct evidence to date that Israel has used armed drones to launch attacks against civilians in Gaza. Testimony from the drone operators commanders and intelligence officers who took part in the attack confirms that they used an armed drone to fire the missile that slammed into a jetty killing a person who had entered the container and also to launch a second strike which killed three of the survivors as they fled across the beach.
According to the testimony of one naval officer involved in the strikes the mission was initially considered “a great success” because the strike team believed wrongly that they had killed four Hamas militants preparing to launch an attack on Israeli forces.
Within minutes of the two strikes however a group of international journalists who had witnessed the attack from nearby hotels reported that the victims torn apart by the missiles were not adult militants but four small boys cousins who were 10 and 11 years old. Another four boys from the same family survived the attack but were left with shrapnel wounds and deep emotional scars.
Harrowing images of the children running desperately across the beach after the first missile had killed their cousin were quickly shared by a Palestinian photographer an AlJazeera reporter and a camera crew from French television.
A brutal image of the immediate aftermath captured by Tyler Hicks of the New York Times one of the journalists who witnessed the attack made the killing of the four boys all of them sons of Gaza fishermen from the Bakr family reverberate worldwide.
The French TV correspondent Liseron Boudoul whose report that day included distressing video of the boys running along the beach before the second strike noted that she and other witnesses to the attack were unclear where exactly the missiles had come from — although initial speculation centered on Israeli naval vessels seen just offshore.
After images of the attack prompted widespread outrage Israel’s army conducted a review of the mission and recommended that a military police investigation into possible criminal negligence be conducted. The testimonies collected by the military police from the strike team were included in a report presented to Israel’s military advocate general Maj. Gen. Danny Efroni 11 months after the boys were killed.
