The Israeli military has admitted its forces fired on ambulances in the Gaza Strip, claiming they were identified as “suspicious vehicles”. Hamas has condemned the incident as a “war crime” that it says killed at least one person.
The incident occurred last Sunday in the Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood in the southern city of Rafah, near the border with Egypt. Israeli forces launched an offensive in the area on March 20, two days after the army resumed aerial bombardments of Gaza following an almost two-month truce. Attacks on medical personnel, hospitals, and ambulances are considered potential war crimes under international law.
The Israeli military, in a statement to Agence France-Presse, said its troops had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists”.
“A few minutes afterward, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops … The troops responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles, eliminating a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists,” the military claimed. It did not specify if there was any fire emanating from the vehicles.
The military added that “after an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles … were ambulances and fire trucks”. It also accused “terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip” of “the repeated use” of ambulances for “terrorist purposes”.
The day after the incident, Gaza’s civil defence agency reported that it had lost contact with a team of six rescuers from Tal al-Sultan who had been urgently dispatched to respond to reports of deaths and injuries. On Friday, the agency announced the discovery of the body of the team leader and the rescue vehicles – an ambulance and a firefighting vehicle. It also said a vehicle belonging to the Palestine Red Crescent Society was “reduced to a pile of scrap metal”.
Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, accused Israel of carrying out “a deliberate and brutal massacre against civil defence and Palestinian Red Crescent teams in the city of Rafah”.
“The targeted killing of rescue workers – who are protected under international humanitarian law – constitutes a flagrant violation of the Geneva conventions and a war crime,” Naim said.
Since Israel resumed military operations in Gaza on March 18 following nearly two months of ceasefire, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and thousands displaced, according to Gaza health officials.
The conflict began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing approximately 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages. Israel’s subsequent military offensive has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Most of Gaza’s 2.1 million population has been displaced, many multiple times. An estimated 70% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed, with healthcare, water and sanitation systems collapsing amid shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.
Experts, governments, United Nations agencies, and non-governmental organisations have accused Israel of carrying out genocide against the Palestinian people.
