A judicial doctor who examined the bodies of some of the 15 paramedical paramedics and Palestinian rescuers shot down by Israeli forces and buried in a mass tomb in the south of Gaza said that there was evidence to kill Execution Style, based on the “specific and intentional” location of the shots at a bland bland.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the Palestinian Civil Defense and UN employees were on a humanitarian mission to recover dead and injured civilians outside the southern city of Rafah on the morning of March 23 when they were killed and then buried in the sand by a bulldozer alongside their flattened vehicles, according to the UN.
Israel has widened its air attacks and on the ground in Gaza since the end of the ceasefire last month. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that he intended to “divide” the territory.
The murder of paramedical paramedics and rescuers triggered indignation in the world and requests for responsibility. On Wednesday, British Foreign Minister David Lammy said Gaza was the deadliest place on the land for humanitarian workers.
“The recent deaths of aid workers are a brutal reminder. Managers must be held responsible,” Lammy said.
Ahmad Dhaher, a forensic consultant who examined five of the dead at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis after being exhumed, they said that they died of ball injury. “All cases had been shot with several balls, with the exception of one, which could not be determined due to the mutilation of the body by animals like dogs, leaving it almost as a skeleton,” Dhaher told the Guardian.
“The preliminary analysis suggests that they were executed, and not from a distant scope, because the locations of the ball injury were specific and intentional,” he said. “An observation is that the bullets were targeting a person’s head, another in their hearts, and a third person had been shot dead with six or seven balls in the chest.”
He stressed that there was a place for uncertainty due to the decomposition of the remains, and that in other cases, he examined “most of the bullets have targeted the joints, such as the shoulder, the elbow, the ankle or the wrist”.
Two witnesses to the recovery of the bodies told Guardian on Tuesday that they had seen the bodies whose hands and legs had been linked, suggesting that they had been detained before their death. A spokesperson for the Crescent-Rouge, Nebal Farsakh, said on Wednesday that one of the paramedical paramedics “had his hands tied with his legs to his body”.
Dhaher said there was no clear evidence of constraints on the five organizations he had examined. “I could not recognize any trace of the link in the hands due to the state of decomposition of the five cases that I checked, so I cannot be sure,” he said.
Israeli defense forces and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu said that the FDI soldiers had opened fire on ambulances and rescue vehicles because they “progressed with suspicion to TSAhal troops without headlights or emergency signals”. Government representatives claimed to have killed a Hamas military agent whom they appointed Mohammad Amin Ibrahim Shubaki, and “eight other terrorists” of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, during the March 23 attack.
However, Shubaki was not among the recovered bodies of the mass tomb outside Rafah on Saturday and Sunday, eight of whom were identified as ambulance workers from the Red Crescent, six as civil defense rescue workers, and one as an employee of the United Nations UNRWA rescue agency. The FDI did not answer questions about the reasons why the dead were buried with their vehicles or to report that some showed signs of having been linked.
The only survivor of shots on March 23, Munther Abed, a Red Crescent volunteer, contradicted the official Israeli account, saying that ambulances had observed security protocols when they were attacked.
“During the day and the night, it’s the same thing: the external and internal lights are lit. Everything tells you that it is an ambulance that belongs to the Palestinian red crescent. All the lights were lit until we were part of the direct fire,” Abed told the world.
Abed, who was in the first ambulance to have crispened early in the morning of March 23, said that he had survived because he threw himself on the ground at the back of the vehicle at the start of the shooting. The two paramedical paramedics of the front seats of the ambulance were killed in the hail of Israeli shots. Abed was detained and interviewed by Israeli soldiers before being released.
The other 13 victims were all in a convoy of five vehicles sent a few hours later to recover the bodies of the two ambulance workers who died. All were slaughtered and buried in the same grave.
A Guardian survey published in February revealed that more than 1,000 medical employees had been killed through Gaza since the start of the conflict on October 7, 2023 – triggered by an attack in Hamas against southern Israel which killed 1,200 Israelis – until the beginning of a temporary ceasefire in January. Many hospitals have been reduced to ruins in the attacks that a commission of the United Nations Human Rights Council has concluded war crimes.
Since the end of the two-month ceasefire last month, Israel has promised to intensify its military campaign against Hamas. Wednesday, the Minister of Defense, Israel Katz, said that the campaign extended to “seize an extensive territory” in the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu said that Israel intended to build a new safety corridor because he “divided the band”.
Officials from the Palestinian Territory Hospital said that the Israeli strikes of strikes during the night and Wednesday had killed at least 40 people, or nearly a dozen children.
