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Health workers should never be the targets and yet we're here today digging up a mass grave of first responders and paramedics. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars we end. Right now all eyes are on Washington but who's actually watching Europe at the moment?
to the Middle East now and more than 50,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the war began. That's according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.
I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battlelines. It's Monday the 7th of April 2025. Black Monday, some people are already starting to call it. We're not yet at 1987 levels. On that day the Dow Jones slid 22.6%. Most of the stock market slides we've seen so far are well short of that.
We'll be bringing you more on the global economic chaos on Friday's Trump edition of the podcast. In the meantime, hold on to your hats and your pensions. Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington on Monday for talks with Donald Trump. Officially, he was there to talk about the 14% tariff imposed on Israel, but he was almost certainly going to talk about a possible Israeli-American strike on Iran.
And he'll also be talking about the resumed war in Gaza, where the AP reported this morning that Israel has dramatically expanded its footprint to hold more than 50% of the Strip. And the Israeli pressure group Breaking the Silence says the military is laying the groundwork for future Israeli military control of the area, citing soldiers who told them that everything functional had been destroyed to make it impossible for Palestinians to return. That's something the Israeli government denies.
But over the weekend, one video that emerged from Gaza put the conflict back on the front pages. And Venetia Rainey has been looking at that particular incident. Where does it begin? So we have to rewind a few weeks to March 23rd. In the early hours of that day, a Red Crescent ambulance is sent to rescue some people injured by an airstrike in Rafah. It comes under Israeli fire in a place called Hashashin. It's just outside the southern city of Rafah. Two paramedics are killed and a third is detained by the Israeli army.
So shortly afterwards, while it's still dark, a convoy of Red Crescent ambulances, a fire truck and health ministry vehicles and a UN car are dispatched to help retrieve their colleagues' bodies. So this is where that newly released video picks up.
Out of a cracked windscreen, you can see part of the convoy driving down an empty road. There's sandbanks either side. You can see two ambulances and a fire engine, and they've all got their red or sometimes blue emergency lights blaring. Like I said, it's still dark. They are impossible to miss. After a while, the convoy pulls over. They appear to have spotted their colleague's ambulance on the side of the road. You can see a white vehicle with no lights on. You can hear a man in the car saying, God, hopefully they are OK.
Then several men, including at least two in reflective uniforms, can be seen getting out and running over to this vehicle. And whoever is filming gets out too. Pretty much immediately, and there's no warning here, Israeli troops start firing.
The paramedic filming appears to be running because the video then becomes this blurred mix of the ground and his hand. You can hear shots raining down and you can hear the man repeating the Muslim Shahada. I bear witness that there is no God but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God. It's essentially the prayer of a man facing death. I bear witness that there is no God but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God.
I bear witness that there is no god but Allah and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. The camera is covered from now on from this point and it's a seven minute long video but the man appears to have stopped moving. You can hear him repeating the Shahada over and over again. He says God is great. A little later during a lull in the gunfire, the paramedic can be heard asking his mother for forgiveness. O Lord, forgive me and forgive me. O Lord, forgive me. This is the way I chose. To help people.
This is the path I chose, to help people, he says. Forgive me, forgive me. As the gunfire picks up again, you can hear a man saying in Arabic somewhere that there are Israelis there. And then right at the end of the video, there are shouts in Hebrew and Arabic. It's a bit confusing and it's not clear what they're saying.
Then the video ends. OK, so what happens next and why does this make such a splash now? Because this happened on March the 23rd, I think you were saying. There's something particular about this emerging over the weekend that changes the story. Yeah, so we don't have that video initially, right? In the days that followed, the Israeli army blocked access to the site. All we know is that some terrorists
emergency responders have disappeared. We start to hear some dribs and jabs of reports. There are repeated requests by the UN and Gaza's civil defense agency to go to the site. On March 27th, so a couple of days after this incident, some officials from the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
They make it to the site, but then they have to leave again shortly afterwards. So it's only on March 30th that OCHA officials and Red Crescent workers are actually able to make it to the site of this incident. And that's when we get a video from Jonathan Whittle, the head of OCHA's Occupied Palestinian Territories office, filming a short statement from the site, which he describes as a mass grave.
Health workers should never be the targets. And yet we're here today digging up a mass grave of first responders and paramedics seven days ago. So in this video, several bodies can be seen being dug out of the sand and then covered in white sheets. At least one of the bodies is still dressed in his bright red first responder uniform. You can also see the crushed remains of a fire truck being excavated. It's an absolute horror what has happened here. This should never happen. Healthcare workers should never be a target to kill.
That video ends with a shot of nine bodies covered in white sheets, but we know that a total of 15 bodies were eventually recovered. One UN staff member, five civil defense responders, and eight Red Crescent workers. Now the phone that had the video that we talked about earlier, that was found on one of those bodies, and he's now been named in the media as Rafat Radwan. There is a ninth Red Crescent staff member in the convoy, Assad al-Nasara, he still remains unaccounted for.
Those bodies were then taken to somewhere for autopsy in Gaza, of course. And according to witnesses and a forensics consultant who's spoken to the media and saw the bodies during the autopsies, some had their hands or feet tied and some had execution-style bullet wounds, including to the head. So what has Israel said about this? So a lot of the furore over this is pessimism.
because of the differing accounts that Israel has given. So initially, the IDF released a statement claiming troops opened fire because the vehicles were identified as suspicious after they advanced, and I'm quoting here, without headlights or emergency signals, their movement was not coordinated in advance. But as we've heard, that account is directly challenged by the new video, which was released over the weekend by the New York Times and is set to be shared with the UN Security Council.
So since then, the IDF have admitted that what they said at first was incorrect, and they've now shared fresh details from their initial investigation. What does that say? So the IDF say that the unit in question was formed of Galani soldiers operating under the 14th Armoured Brigade. Earlier that night, on March 23rd, they had ambushed a Hamas police vehicle, which they had left by the side of the road.
A little while later, they spotted the convoy heading their way via a drone and they thought it was suspicious. When the convoy stopped by the Hamas police vehicle, according to the IDF, people jumped out and the soldiers opened fire. The IDF said the soldiers did not know that they were unarmed medics. The IDF also denied that anyone was handcuffed or executed at close range. They said the bodies were buried to stop dogs from eating them, which they described as an approved and regular practice in Gaza.
They also said that six of those killed were Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists. Now, they haven't provided evidence of that yet, but that is expected to come when the investigation is concluded later this week. The UN and Red Crescent have both called for an independent investigation, and there have also been calls for a proper investigation from people within Israel. Among those is former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who's a longtime critic of current Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is Ehud speaking to Nick Robinson on the Today programme this morning. My judgment and my impression is that it smells. It smells of a cover-up. It smells of something that sounds and looks very bad.
for the way that the Israeli military unit conducted itself. It looks like unlike what was announced at the beginning by the Israeli military spokesman, there were lights, there were signs, the convoy tried to identify itself as a rescue convoy and they were found dead and buried
And in some cases it is said, I don't know, but it is said it needs to be investigated. They were handcuffed.
It looks bad, it sounds bad, it smells bad, and it disturbs me and I'm sure many Israelis very much. And what do you want to see happen now? I think it has to be investigated. I must say, I don't know by whom. I still think that the army, under the leadership of President, Chief of Staff, General Zamir, will take all the necessary measures to make a thorough and serious investigation
A reliable investigation. And I believe that as a result of it, there will have to be legal measures taken against those who are responsible for it. Vinicius, could you just give us some wider context here? I know it's a long-running conflict. It can be difficult if you take your eye off the ball to remember what's going on. The war started on October 7th, as we all know, with Hamas' attack on Israel.
Earlier this year, there was a ceasefire. I'm pretty sure we talked about it. The war has somehow resumed. What's going on? So we had phase one of the ceasefire deal and we had some hostages being released pretty much on a weekly basis in return for Palestinian prisoners. It was normally sort of a handful of hostages and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners were released. That was the setup for phase one. It lasted about six weeks.
At the beginning of March, we were supposed to enter phase two of the ceasefire hostage deal. That would have involved much more significant discussions, essentially about the future of Gaza. Who's going to govern it? What kind of security conditions will there be for Israel? How to put a permanent end to this war for the Israeli troops to withdraw completely from Gaza? That's all super tricky stuff. Talks had supposed to have been happening around the world.
around those issues from February onwards, but those talks never happened. There was a lot of talk within the Israeli government that they didn't want to enter that second phase. Itamar Ben-Gavir withdrew from the coalition on that basis and has since rejoined now that Israel is commencing the war again with Gaza. So essentially, I mean, a prisoner exchange is one thing. It's relatively straightforward. But what
What seems to have happened is that the really difficult stuff, the really fundamental underlying stuff was never addressed. And when it was time to address that, it couldn't be. The discussions about who will govern Gaza because it can't be Hamas, that just hasn't happened. What the Israelis and Americans proposed to Hamas when the first phase of the ceasefire ended was to continue with the hostage prisoner swap situation and to release more hostages and more Palestinian prisoners. Hamas said, no, we don't want to do that.
and talks collapsed. The Israelis have resumed their offensive. Have they given a statement of objective? What is the end objective of the current offensive? Is it simply the release of all the hostages? The objectives remain largely unchanged from the beginning of the war. The elimination of Hamas, the release of all the hostages, and the idea that October 7th could never happen again. These are all driving principles for Israel in their war. So in terms of context, how many people have now died? We should say on the death tolls, obviously they've been very disputed.
So the total number is more than 50,000 been killed, more than 114,000 injured. That's according to the Hamas-run Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. Gaza's health ministry did recently remove just under 2,000 people from its official list of war fatalities since October 7th, apparently after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned. The death toll is still above 50,000. That's following those removals. Thank you, Venetia.
After the break, the Battle of Khartoum is over, but is Sudan's civil war just beginning?
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In Sudan, two years into the civil war, the military tide has suddenly turned, and in dramatic fashion. The Sudanese armed forces, the followers of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, have recaptured the capital Khartoum from the rapid support forces. Led by rival would-be dictator Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, or Hemeti. Is this war finally coming to an end? David Blair, our chief foreign affairs commentator, has been following developments.
David, you've reported from Khartoum, which is part of the reason I asked you into the studio. Could you perhaps start by just giving us the latest? What's the situation as we understand it now? So on the 28th of March, the Sudanese armed forces recaptured Khartoum. This is a big moment, as you said. Khartoum and the neighbouring city of Omdurman have a combined population of about 7 million. The
This is the heart of the country that's changed hands. But it does not mean that this war is any closer to a conclusion than it was before. Sudan is a vast country. The RSF, who've now lost their grip on the capital, still control huge areas, particularly in Darfur, which is their heartland.
And the fighting, alas, is going to go on because the two men at the heart of this, General Burhan, the commander of the Sudanese armed forces, and General Dagalo, universally known as Hemeti, who commands the RSF, each of them is fighting for exclusive rights to loot the country. And they are not going to give up. Just to give a bit of geography about the Battle of Khartoum, for those who
Unlucky enough not to have been there because it was a wonderful city anyway. Khartoum sits on the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, which then become the Nile. Khartoum itself, it sits within the kind of fork of the river and you have Omdurman, I think, on the... A Sudanese listener is going to get angry now. I think Omdurman is on the western side? Yes, correct. Khartoum sits exactly at the point where the White and Blue Niles converge.
And then the Omjuman is on the opposite bank of the White Nile and also along the point where the two Niles become the single river. But effectively, it's one big conurbation of about 7 million people.
Why were the RSF able to hold on to Khartoum proper for so long? And why did it take so long for the armed forces to dislodge them? And what's changed now? What's made it possible for the armed forces to claim this victory? The RSF have been able to fight very effectively because they've had a lot of external support, principally from the United Arab Emirates.
Emirates, which has supplied them with advanced drones, for example, which has given them a significant combat edge and probably allowed them to take enclaves of Khartoum in the first place.
As for why the military balance has now swung back towards the Sudanese armed forces, they're getting a lot of external support too, principally from Russia and from Iran. It's worth bearing in mind that at the beginning of the conflict, Russia was actually on the other side. They were with the RSF. They had a pre-existing relationship with Hameti, but they seem to have switched now. And the Sudanese armed forces benefiting from this external support are now on the offensive.
But this is a conflict that goes backwards and forwards. Don't exclude the possibility that the RSF might be able to strike back at some point in the coming weeks. There is no meaningful peace process of any kind. The negotiations that did happen last year in Jeddah were organized mainly by the previous American administration. Whether the current American administration has any interest, whatever, in what's happening in Sudan seems pretty doubtful at the moment.
So in the absence of any real diplomatic effort to resolve this war or any will by the two commanders at the top of it, I think the assumption must be that the war is going to continue. And just to bear in mind, no one really knows because Sudan is undercovered. It's extremely difficult for anyone to get there. It's very dangerous. So we don't really know very much about this conflict. But it's quite possible that this is the biggest war in the world right now. In terms of? In terms of the numbers of people dead and displaced.
So one estimate from the Americans last year was that 150,000 people were dead. But that is an extremely broad estimate. The numbers displaced certainly run into the millions. And the country is so vast and so inaccessible that those numbers could even be higher.
And in addition, you have a risk in Sudan, which you don't have in other war zones around the world, which you don't have in Ukraine, for example, which is the risk that there could be a real famine. And in fact, famine may already have begun in areas of the country without anyone really noticing. We did actually have on Lilia and Simon from Global Health who were reporting in the very south of Sudan where famine has begun. And it was pretty, pretty traumatizing stuff. So this is a real catastrophe. If you add it all together...
the risk of famine, perhaps the reality of famine in large areas of the country without anyone really knowing about it. And because people don't really know about it, there's no great relief effort. There's no huge convoys of trucks carrying food into the stricken areas.
In addition, the intense fighting, now that the capital itself changing hands, 7 million people having witnessed the fighting, millions being displaced. You add it all together and this is quite possibly the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world. Dwarfing Gaza, dwarfing Ukraine. Anywhere you care to name.
Again, with the caveat that there's huge uncertainty, we don't really know, but it's quite possible that it is. It's worth reflecting on the fact that the Sudanese armed forces announced the fall of Khartoum
getting on for two weeks ago now, and it's taken us a while to just get around with everything else going in the world, to looking at it seriously. Where does Sudan sit in the wider context? How important is it? There's plenty of countries have interests at stake in Sudan, as evidenced by the fact that countries like the UAE, Iran, etc., have chosen to support one side or the other and supply arms accordingly.
However, to be perfectly blunt, in the broader context, Sudan is not particularly important. There are no great strategic interests by any of the really big powers at stake. Yes, Russia is involved. Yes, Russia is backing the Sudanese armed forces. But that's part of their general emphasis on increasing their influence in Africa. It's not because they have any great interests at stake, although they do have ambitions at
to construct a naval base on the Red Sea for which they need the permission of the Sudanese armed forces. So they do have that interest. But more broadly, Sudan doesn't feature very highly on the geopolitical Richter scale of the world. That's the reality. And that explains why there is no great concerted effort to try and resolve this conflict, even though the humanitarian price is so extraordinary.
David Blair, thank you very much for joining us on Battlelines.
And if you have a moment, leave a review, as it helps others to find the show. To stay on top of all our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter, or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest. You can also get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. The producer is Peter Shevlin and the executive producer is Louisa Wells.
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