Shownotes Transcript
On March 23rd, the death toll in Gaza surpassed 50,000 people killed by Israeli fire in the war with Hamas. This is the story of 15 people who were killed the same day. It was just five days after Israel had ended a ceasefire and resumed attacks on Gaza. There were airstrikes across the territory.
In the south, Israeli troops advanced on the ground, which is where they encountered the crew of emergency workers and ambulances and a fire truck. The troops opened fire and killed the 15 paramedics and rescue workers. At first, the Israeli military said the vehicles were advancing suspiciously toward troops without headlights or emergency signals. It said the soldiers had eliminated a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants. And that is where the story might have ended.
Except a recording was unearthed days later from the phone of one of the paramedics, and it disproved the Israeli military's account. That showed very clearly the cars, the vehicles of the ambulances had their lights on. The fire brigade truck had its lights on.
And the silence. You hear the sound. That's Marwan Jalani, vice president of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. He said his organization had presented the video to the United Nations Security Council and called for an independent investigation. We have never seen an Israeli investigation that resulted in any accountability whatsoever.
After the video became public, Israel did conduct an investigation and released the results over the weekend. It blamed the killings on an operational misunderstanding and cited professional failures. Consider this. In more than 18 months of war, it has been rare for the Israeli military to acknowledge failure. Coming up, we hear from one of the survivors of the attack. ♪♪
From NPR, I'm Juana Somers.
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It's Consider This from NPR. Palestinian officials say nearly 140 rescue workers have been killed on the job in Gaza during the war. The attack in March is notable because it's one of the very few that the Israeli military investigated.
NPR's Aya Batraoui took a closer look at the attack and Israel's changing story about what happened. So, Aya, if you can, just start from the beginning. What do you know about what happened on March 23rd?
It started with Israel shattering the ceasefire, and already hundreds of people had been killed in airstrikes, and Israeli troops were re-entering parts of Gaza they'd withdrawn from earlier. And in the south, the offensive, the ground offensive there, was overwhelming, and it was spreading across all of Rafah. So this was a Sunday, it was before dawn, when a team of Palestinian rescue workers were responding to emergency calls from this area.
The road is dark. Several ambulances and a fire truck light up the night with flashing red and white emergency signals. The scene otherwise is eerily desolate. There's no streetlights, just these flashing lights. This is being filmed by Rifat Radwan, a paramedic in one of the ambulances. Now, he's in the passenger seat filming this with his phone, and he's nervous. They spot an ambulance on the side of the road, and they see bodies. Hey, hey, throw it, throw it, throw it.
They step out and immediately this happens. They come under attack. And just so I understand, these guys are coming out of clearly marked emergency vehicles to check on another ambulance on the side road where some paramedics have already been killed. What happens now?
So Radwan records nearly seven minutes of video on him. And for more than five minutes, we can hear him being shot at, and we can hear him praying to God for forgiveness. Over and over again. And he's also asking his mom to forgive him.
In this moment, he tells his mom he was only trying to save lives, if she could forgive him. Now the gunfire continues for several minutes until we hear some Hebrew being shouted. It's unclear what's being said, but then the video cuts.
And before that video was released, though, Israel's military, they put out their own statement on this incident, and it does not resemble what was in the video, right? Right. So they say troops opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and killed several militants. And they say Hamas repeatedly uses ambulances for its own purposes.
Then they say more vehicles approached them suspiciously soon after this without headlights or emergency signals on, and that troops again killed more Hamas militants. And the military then says that after an initial inquiry, the suspicious vehicles that were moving towards the troops turned out to be ambulances and firetrucks.
Now, if their statement sounds confusing, that's because it is. It's unclear if they're saying that everyone in these cars was identified as militants or if they're actually saying they were militants. But they do acknowledge that these were rescue vehicles and did not have their lights on. That's what they say. Now, unlike other attacks in Gaza where there are two versions of events, sometimes the Israeli side or the Palestinian, in this one, there's proof.
It was that video unearthed on the body of Radwan, who was one of the 15 killed that night. It was on his phone in his pocket.
And Aya, you and NPR's producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, actually spoke with a survivor from that night. Can you just tell us a bit about him and what he told you? Sure. So there's only two survivors from this evening, Munzer Abed and another paramedic, Assad Al-Nasara, who's still being held by the Israeli military, detained. And they haven't said why they're holding him. Now, Abed was also detained by troops that night. I saw a group of people, and they were shooting at me with guns.
He says the Israeli troops cursed him, his religion spat on him, beat him with their rifles. He was blindfolded the entire time before they let him go 15 hours later. The 27-year-old told us he didn't think he was going to survive the shooting or that evening. Abbott says this isn't the first time the Israeli military has killed rescue workers in Gaza, and he doesn't think it'll be the last.
He believes they did try to cover up the attack fearing a scandal, but says, "Thank God the video revealed the truth." Now, Munzer's been a paramedic with the Red Crescent for 10 years, and he says this was the first time he'd ever come under direct fire. He says he can't work anymore. He's too traumatized.
He told us he suffers from nightmares, and he'd already lost a brother who was an aid worker who was killed last year in an Israeli airstrike. Wow. And for days after this attack, the Palestinian Red Crescent and civil defense were demanding answers about their missing crews. The U.N. was finally given permission by Israel to enter this area of Rafah and recover the bodies. What did they find?
So Jonathan Whittle leads the UN's humanitarian response in Gaza, and he led this recovery mission. So from the UN car, on that mission to retrieve these bodies, they come across and film a woman, they say, shot by Israeli troops in Rafah while trying to heed military evacuation orders in this area. And then the video also shows a young man shot trying to retrieve her. Interesting.
And what did they find when they reached the site where the paramedics and rescue workers were killed? They find the 15 bodies in a mass grave. And they found the ambulances crushed into the sand by bulldozers. And tell us what the Israeli military's investigation determined in all of this.
Well, it's important to know that they premise the findings around the mindset of the troops. And they say that this was a hostile combat zone. But the investigation also says that from the start, it's the troops' responsibility to respect and protect medical teams. So the military says there were three shootings by Israeli troops that night in this area. The first hit a Palestinian ambulance, and it was the bodies of those medics that the rescue vehicles came upon when they too were attacked.
Then there was a third vehicle, a UN car with a Palestinian aid worker inside, who arrived after the main shooting and was himself killed. So the investigation says the deputy commander on the ground was operating under a, quote, sense of threat and that he ordered troops to open fire. The investigation determines these were the result of a, quote, operational misunderstanding. And they say that this deputy commander did not recognize the emergency vehicles due to what they say was unauthorized.
poor night visibility, and the investigation faults him for providing what they describe as an inaccurate and incomplete report during his debriefing about what originally had happened that night. Now, this deputy commander was dismissed from his position, but he was described in the military's findings as a highly respected officer who'd been volunteering his service after the October 7th attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 people in Israel in 2023.
Now, the military also reprimanded a top commanding officer, but stopped short of dismissing him. Okay, but what did they have to say about the bodies that were buried in this mass grave and the vehicles that were crushed? The military determined that removing the bodies was reasonable under the circumstances, they say, to prevent further harm to them, but that the decision to crush the vehicles was wrong. And they insist there was no attempt by soldiers to conceal the event. Ayo, what has been the response to this attack as well as the military's investigations?
The Palestinian Red Crescent says the military's investigation conceals a wider truth, that the Israeli military repeatedly commits violations. You know, before this attack, 125 Palestinian emergency workers had already been killed on the job over the past 18 months of this war in Gaza.
And Whittle of the UN, who led that recovery mission, he's also urged greater accountability. He says the conclusion that the ambulances couldn't be recognized in the dark flies in the face of the evidence. And earlier this month, in a briefing from Gaza, he said this about the attack on the rescue workers. I think it's really emblematic of the point that we've reached in Gaza. What is happening here defies decency, defies justice.
Humanity defies the law. It really is a war without limits. A war without limits. And that's what critics say soldiers on the ground are hearing from their leaders. So in a video circulating online aired on Israel's Channel 14 News, the commander of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion, whose forces were involved in the shooting, tells them before last month's ground offensive. Everyone you meet is an enemy. You identify a person, you throw them out, you kill them. You move forward.
Don't get confused in this relationship. Anyone we encounter is an enemy. We identify a figure, we eliminate it. And he says this is how to free Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza. Now, this commander's deputy was the one dismissed after the investigation. But this message of military pressure is being echoed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Before we kill Hamas in Gaza,
Just this weekend, he said Israel will not stop the war until hostages are returned on Israeli terms of a ceasefire and Hamas is destroyed. Now, since this attack a month ago, Israeli airstrikes and attacks have killed another 1,400 Palestinians. Gaza's health ministry says a third of them are children. And the Israeli military has taken over the entire southern stretch of Gaza and is taking over more territory in other areas. And it continues pushing ahead with its offensive.
That was NPR's Aya Batrawi in Dubai. Thank you so much. Thanks, Juana. This episode was produced by Connor Donovan with reporting by Anas Baba, Hadil El-Shalchi, Yanal Jabarin, Abu Bakr Bashir, and Ahmed Abu Hamda. It was edited by James Heider and Courtney Dorney. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.
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