There’s rarely accountability for the deaths of aid workers. It’s time that changed - and Australia can help

The headline says “rarely accountability.” I say: count.

Zomi Frankcom, Australian, killed in Gaza in April 2024, one of seven workers with the World Central Kitchen convoy struck in three separate strikes along a road whose route had been cleared with the military beforehand. The stated reason: a suspected militant in the vehicle. The actual reason: the vehicles were known, marked, and approved. The pretext does not survive the facts.

And she is not alone. The record shows more aid workers killed in recent years than at any point since systematic counting began - hundreds across Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza, South Sudan. The killers vary. The outcome does not. When the pretext changes and the death stays constant, the pretext is not the cause. The cause is the certainty that no ledger will be opened.

Israel’s own inquiry found “serious failures” and dismissed two officers. No criminal proceeding. No independent investigation. The state investigated itself and found what it wished to find. This is the oldest entry in the book: when the accused controls the record, the record absolves the accused.

So I note what Australia can actually do - not statements of regret, which cost nothing, but the withholding of arms exports, the referral to international bodies, the naming of the specific unit and the specific strike. A government that mourns loudly and ships quietly has chosen its side of the ledger.

I have spent my life learning that the map matters. Pin every name. Zomi Frankcom, April 1, 2024, Deir al-Balah. Lalzawomi Frankcom, who fed people for a living. The word “rarely” is doing dishonest work in that headline. It is not rarity. It is policy, unprosecuted. Count the deaths, date them, name them - and then watch how quickly “isolated incident” dies on the page.

24 August 2026.

The headline says: “There’s rarely accountability for the deaths of aid workers.” Read it again. Not “rarely punished.” Not “no one is tried.” Accountability. A noun with no verb behind it, no court, no cell, no name attached to anything. The word promises a reckoning while specifying none.

And the second sentence: “Israel’s refusal to investigate reflects a long standing problem of insufficient accountability.” Insufficient. As though accountability were a nutrient, and the diet merely lacking. Somewhere in that adjective is a woman named Zomi Frankcom, killed - by whom, under what order, no sentence will say. The passive construction has done its work before the article begins. She was killed; the killing reflected; the problem stands long. Three clauses, not one actor.

I have watched this grammar before. The report on the dead arrives as a “findings” document; the findings are “inconclusive”; the inconclusiveness is “regrettable”; the regret is “expressed.” Expressed - to whom? Into what? The verb needs an object and receives only air. Meanwhile the man who pressed the trigger eats dinner, and the ministry that issued the rules of engagement issues new ones, worded more carefully this time, so that next year’s findings may be conclusive about nothing at all.

Who profits from this vocabulary? Every government that kills at distance. If the death of a foreign aid worker can be filed under “insufficient accountability,” then the file closes itself. The category manages the corpse.

Australia “can help,” the headline offers. Help how? By asking politely? By adding its protest to the pile of protests already expressed?

One sentence should be printed over all of it, and I offer it without comment: she went to feed people, and the state that shot her will investigate itself.

24 August 2026.

A woman carried food to the hungry. A shell found her. The government that fired the shell was asked to investigate itself. It declined. This is the whole of the news, and the news has been the same for a hundred years; only the names change.

I have seen this arrangement before. The executioner is also the magistrate. When I point at the absurdity, someone explains that it is not absurd but procedure - that nations investigate their own soldiers, that such investigations take time, that time is a form of respect for the dead. The dead do not need respect. They needed bread delivered, and then they needed nothing.

Notice who watches. The killing is filmed now, from above, clean as a painting. The footage is shown, discussed, archived. Committees convene. Reports are drafted in careful language: incident, regret, ongoing review. The word “regret” does more work than any shell; it closes the matter so efficiently that no one must lie. Everyone speaks truthfully and the truth changes nothing. That is craftsmanship.

And here is what troubles me most. The crowd does not turn away. It leans in. Each death becomes a brief item, consumed with breakfast, felt sincerely for four minutes, then set down like a chopstick. The spectators are not cruel. They are fed - by the spectacle of suffering, which satisfies something in them while feeding no one in Gaza. Sincerity without consequence is the most refined anesthetic ever compounded.

The article says Australia can help. Perhaps. But I have watched powerful friends write letters before, and I know the letter’s weight: it is paper, and paper stops no shrapnel. Still, someone must keep the ledger. Someone must write down the name - Zomi Frankcom - beside the date, beside the refusal, so that when the investigators finally finish their decades of deliberation, there remains one plain sentence they cannot unwrite:

She brought food. They knew she was bringing food. They fired anyway.