Autopsies conducted on 15 Palestinian paramedics and civil emergency responders who were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza show they were shot in the upper body with “intent to kill”, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, which is demanding an international investigation into the attack.
The killings took place in the southern Gaza Strip on 23 March, days into a renewed Israeli offensive in the Hamas-ruled territory, and sparked international condemnation.
The results of the postmortems join a growing body of evidence that sharply contradicts Israel’s account of the incident, including video footage that shows the vehicles were travelling with headlights and flashing red lights that identified them, with personnel wearing hi-vis vests, at the time they were fired on.
Germany, one of Israel’s closest backers in the EU, called for an urgent investigation into the incident on Monday. “There are very significant questions about the actions of the Israeli army now,” the foreign ministry spokesperson Christian Wagner said after the video footage emerged.
“An investigation and accountability of the perpetrators are urgently needed,” he said, adding that a full investigation of the incident would be “a question that ultimately affects the credibility of the Israeli constitutional state”.
Those killed included eight Red Crescent staff, six members of the Gaza civil defence agency and one employee of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
The bodies were later found buried near the site of the shooting in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah city, in what the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs described as a mass grave.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initially said its soldiers “did not randomly attack” any ambulances, insisting they fired on “terrorists” that were approaching in “suspicious vehicles”.
Lt Col Nadav Shoshani said troops had opened fire on vehicles that had no prior clearance from Israeli authorities and had their lights off, a statement contradicted by video recovered from the mobile phone of one of those killed.
The IDF later changed its story and conceded its earlier account had been “mistaken”. It claimed on Sunday that at least six of the medics were linked to Hamas, but has provided no evidence. None of those killed were armed.
It said on Monday that its initial investigation into the killings had shown that the incident occurred “due to a sense of threat”, and claimed six Hamas militants had been in the vicinity.
The Israeli army chief, Lt Gen Eyal Zamir ordered a more in-depth investigation into the attack after completion of the initial one.
The president of the Red Crescent in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Younis al-Khatib, told journalists in Ramallah: “There has been an autopsy of the martyrs from the Red Crescent and civil defence teams. We cannot disclose everything we know, but I will say that all the martyrs were shot in the upper part of their bodies, with the intent to kill.”
He called for an international investigation into the killings, which the IDF has separately announced it was looking into.
“Why did you hide the bodies?” Khatib asked of the Israeli forces involved in the attack. “We call on the world to form an independent and impartial international commission of inquiry into the circumstances of the deliberate killing of the ambulance crews in the Gaza Strip.
“It is no longer sufficient to speak of respecting the international law and Geneva convention. It is now required from the international community and the UN security council to implement the necessary punishment against all who are responsible.”
In the past 18 months of war Israeli forces have conducted attacks that have killed hundreds of medical workers and the staff of NGOs and UN organisations, including foreign nationals working in Gaza. Six members of World Central Kitchen, including the Briton James Kirby, died in a sustained Israeli attack on their clearly marked vehicles.
Human rights organisations have long accused Israel of a culture of impunity with few soldiers ever facing justice.
A Palestinian journalist was killed and several others wounded on Monday, when Israel struck a media tent near Nasser hospital in Khan Younis.
According to the Palestinian Civil Defence, an organisation affiliated with Hamas’s interior ministry, two people – Helmi al-Faqawi and a civilian, Yousef al-Khazandar – were killed when the Palestine Today agency’s tent was struck.
