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