Aerial view shows a World Central Kitchen (WCK) barge loaded with food arriving off Gaza, in this handout image released March 15, 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS

The IDF announced on Saturday that it had conducted a targeted strike on a vehicle inside Gaza, eliminating Hazmi Kadih (also known as Ahed Azmi Qudeih), a Palestinian who infiltrated Kibbutz Nir Oz and took part in the October 7 terror attacks last year.

Kadih also happens to have been an employee of the World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid agency.

True to form, WCK joined the bloated, overfunded ecosystem of Palestinian-focused aid organizations professing ignorance about their staff’s double lives, instead issuing a statement expressing that it was “heartbroken” over the incident and claiming to have “no knowledge that any individual in the vehicle had alleged ties to the October 7th Hamas attack.”

This response is particularly rich coming from an organization that, earlier this year, demanded an “independent inquiry” into the IDF’s actions after several WCK workers were killed in an Israeli strike in April.

Back then, WCK declared that the IDF could not “credibly” investigate itself and insisted that “systemic change” was necessary to prevent “more military failures, more apologies, and more grieving families.”

Perhaps WCK will now call for an independent inquiry into how someone who took part in the mass murder of innocent civilians –and made his support for it crystal clear on social media — managed to infiltrate its ranks.

Or will this damning revelation be quietly brushed aside, as accountability rarely seems to flow in the other direction?

I found the Facebook account of Ahed Azmi Qadi, the @WCKitchen employee who was also a terrorist who participated in the October 7th massacre.

Let’s see what he’s posted🧵 https://t.co/yuMVW8auLB pic.twitter.com/32XDgGIT5y

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) November 30, 2024

We somehow suspect it will be the latter, and it wouldn’t be all that surprising, given that the media are already laying the groundwork to help WCK weather this scandal unscathed.

Let’s examine the headlines reporting the IDF’s strike on the terrorist-linked vehicle.

Nearly every mainstream news outlet — including BBC, NPR, AFP, Reuters, and Sky News — framed the incident as Israel simply “killing aid workers,” while emphasizing that WCK has now suspended its Gaza operations as a result of the strike.

This narrative seems carefully constructed to villainize Israel, and deflect scrutiny from WCK’s hiring practices — or the uncomfortable evidence that one of its employees was involved in a massacre of innocent civilians.

To its credit, Sky News at least acknowledged the Hamas connection to the October 7 attacks in its subheading — a minimal nod to the context that others failed to provide.

Below are the headlines from Reuters, the BBC, NPR, and AFP — all of which hid the truth:

Reuters

BBC

NPR

AFP

In contrast, a handful of outlets, including The New York Times, ABC News, POLITICO, The Los Angeles Times, and, surprisingly, The Guardian, deserve commendation for including the IDF’s statement that Hazmi Kadih was a terrorist.

Their reporting proves that it is possible to fit critical facts into a headline, but that in some cases the media chooses not to.

The Guardian

POLITICO

New York Times

Los Angeles Times

The real problem lies in the reluctance of many in the media to report anything that tarnishes the carefully cultivated image of aid organizations.

As we’ve seen time and again, there’s a troubling “dualism” within these organizations operating in Gaza. Publicly, they speak in the language of compassion and neutrality. Behind the scenes, however, they are too often staffed with antisemites, terror sympathizers, or the dangerously naive.

This latest revelation about WCK employing a terrorist isn’t an outlier — it’s yet another glaring example of the systemic issues plaguing the overfunded and under-scrutinized aid sector in Gaza.

Back in April, when Israel swiftly acknowledged, apologized for, investigated, and even dismissed senior officers involved in a tragic drone strike that killed WCK aid workers, the media wasted no time branding Israel as guilty of everything from “trigger-happy behavior” to “going rogue.”

The incident wasn’t treated as an isolated, tragic mistake — the kind that happens in warfare, as we’ve seen countless times with many of Israel’s closest allies fighting in the Middle East, including the United States.

And yet, whenever an aid worker in Gaza is unmasked as a Hamas terrorist, the media fall conspicuously silent. If the connection to terrorism is acknowledged at all, it’s presented as a one-off anomaly rather than evidence of a systemic “terror problem” within these organizations. The same scrutiny and outrage never seem to apply.

It’s the double standard we’ve come to expect but must not accept. How many more so-called “humanitarian workers” must be exposed as murderous terrorists before the media acknowledge that not every aid group is beyond reproach? This pattern of silence and selective outrage cannot continue. It’s time for the media to hold these organizations accountable — or at least admit they have no interest in doing so.

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.