On: There’s rarely accountability for the deaths of aid workers. It’s time that...

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.