New leaks from testimony in the World Central Kitchen (WCK) probe have raised further questions about why IDF Col. Nochi Mendel was fired from his post but not prosecuted.
In the WCK saga, on April 1, 2024, the IDF accidentally and mistakenly killed seven international food aid workers.
According to what was framed as a final report issued on a heavy delay just weeks ago, on August 19, by IDF Chief Prosecutor Col. Eli Levertov, Mendel and his staff made a series of errors that led to the mistaken targeting of the WCK convoy, but the errors did not reach the threshold for criminality.
Part of the explanation of Levertov and the IDF legal division at the time was that Mendel believed he was ordering the targeting of Hamas terrorists, such that his error, however tragic, could not possibly lead to an indictment, when no criminal intent would be provable.
However, the newly leaked transcript of Mendel’s testimony regarding the case may leave him more open to prosecution and the IDF legal division’s decision to close the case open to appeal to Israeli courts.
According to the leak, published in the Guardian on September 5 and the veracity of which the IDF has not denied, Mendel deemed the various officials “running the convoy to have ‘mixed together’ with alleged Hamas militants, where mixing together was defined as being ‘near them, talking, playing, hanging out and so on’. Asked whether the presence of armed men made the entire convoy a target, Mendel replied: ‘Certainly.'”
Leaked testimony raises new questions over Mendel’s conduct
In contrast, the IDF said in its August 19 statement, and in an additional response sent to the Jerusalem Post on Monday, that its targeting policy did not allow commanders to attack humanitarian convoys simply because they saw that a member of the convoy was armed.
In that sense, it would seem that Mendel clearly violated the open fire regulations, leading to the deaths of a number of humanitarian aid personnel, and could conceivably deserve a criminal punishment, not just a disciplinary measure like being fired.
In his defense, the IDF added to the Jerusalem Post in its updated statement on Monday that Mendel had not violated international law, only IDF policy, which is stricter than the minimal requirements of the law.
According to the Monday IDF statement to the Jerusalem Post, a humanitarian convoy that includes an armed member of enemy forces can be legally targeted solely on that basis; it is just that the IDF believes in observing a higher standard as a matter of policy.
Moreover, the IDF statement on Monday emphasized that it was not that Mendel thought that some of the convoy members were Hamas and some were WCK officials, but rather that he thought at the point of attacking that they were now all Hamas terrorists.
In other words, there would also be no proportionality legal analysis: about whether killing one armed Hamas member was a large enough military advantage to justify the collateral harm to the other WCK convoy members – because Mendel believed everyone in the convoy had become Hamas.
Proportionality is only a factor if the attacker believes civilians are intertwined with the enemy forces.
The new problem with this claim from the Mendel transcript is other statements he makes which show a cavalier attitude toward humanitarian officials.
In the transcript, Mendel noted with pride that his unit had been commended by the army hierarchy for its involvement in several strikes on what were deemed to be Hamas’s attempted commandeering of aid. “They applauded us and were pleased with our action,” he said. The difference in the WCK incident was that foreign nationals were killed, he said. “That’s the whole difference. Not a substantive difference.”
Mendel’s summarizing of foreign nationals being killed as not constituting a substantive difference, even if he meant multiple things in that statement, appears to show a “reckless indifference” to their lives, something which can be prosecuted at a lower standard of criminal intent.
In another statement in his testimony, he said, “I remind you that part of our mission was to crush Hamas’s ability to govern,” Mendel said. “Part of the mission was to hit that [Hamas-controlled aid deliveries], and we hit it.”
This would seem to get Mendel off the hook as just following IDF policy, but when added together with the Guardian’s report that in January 2024 Mendel had signed a letter opposing providing aid to Gazans, these statements may suggest he was prepared to “go rogue” against foreign aid workers at a low threshold.
The IDF appears to have tried to improve his narrative, noting that the WCK having armed guards had not been coordinated with the IDF and that IDF officials had tried to call WCK for 30 minutes to clarify the situation, without success.
Yet, an earlier IDF report in 2024 noted that Mendel had wanted to “jump the gun” and attack the convoy at an even earlier point, but his request to attack had been rejected by IDF Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen.
It appears that at a later point, when Mendel thought the whole convoy was Hamas – a second mistake- he ordered the attack without checking in with Cohen again.
When this initial IDF report came out in a vacuum, it seemed Mendel had simply adapted his decision-making to the circumstances. Yet, in light of the new leaked statements he made, one could argue that he intentionally or recklessly avoided checking in with Cohen again because he personally, on a rogue basis, wanted to order the attack, even if there was some risk that the convoy contained humanitarian officials.
The problem with making this case is Mendel’s statements that he had received accolades for other attacks on Hamas trying to take over humanitarian convoys.
An important part of the record if any trial were ever to go forward would be Mendel getting to present all the times that his superiors, including possibly in the IDF high command, complimented him for attacks on convoys believed to have been taken over by Hamas.
The publication of such a list could be deeply embarrassing to the IDF high command and Israel as a whole, even though the IDF does have significant evidence proving Hamas did try to take over aid convoys.
Interestingly enough, the Guardian report also cites other senior IDF officers commenting that most military officials would have acted similarly to Mendel if they had seen the same drone surveillance footage of unidentified armed persons joining the convoy.
This too would seem to exculpate Mendel from any guilt, but could raise more serious questions about whether even the IDF high command had sufficient checks in place to avoid deadly mistakes against aid workers.
Ultimately, the WCK incident was far from the last tragic targeting of aid workers, something which again raises questions about checks in place to protect aid workers, though the IDF will say the incidents happened because the war was unprecedentedly complex and long.
What remains unclear is what international law says about fighting a war with an enemy who so systematically turns the law upside down with abuse.
In this war, after working to evacuate Palestinian civilians en masse from certain neighborhoods, the IDF lowered its threshold of checks and balances in order to more effectively pursue Hamas when it used civilian guises as human shields to try to protect its forces.
In any event, the IDF so far has decided to uphold the prior decision of former IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Herzi Halevi that while tragic, the errors should lead to disciplinary measures but were not a crime.
Regarding the WCK incident, a fascinating twist was that IDF Military Advocate General Naj. Gen. Itay Offir himself did not make the decision, which the Post first reported on exclusively on June 18.
In prior roles as the Defense Ministry legal adviser, Offir apparently worked closely with IDF Mendel, one of the key commander-suspects, on several projects.
Although this does not necessarily violate the “conflict of interest” definition that technically could disqualify him from rendering a decision, as it would if the two were family members, Offir did not feel he could objectively judge Mendel, or at least wanted to remove any perception of favoritism.
For that reason, Levertov issued the decision regarding WCK.
Levertov became IDF chief prosecutor in August 2025, only around two months before Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi’s resignation as the IDF MAG, prior to Offir.
