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Israeli troops executed Palestinian aid workers at ‘point blank range’: Report

The Cradle | February 23, 2026

Israeli soldiers massacred 15 Palestinian aid workers, targeting them with nearly a thousand bullets, including at least eight at point-blank range, in Tal al-Sultan in southern Gaza on 23 March 2025, a joint investigation by the independent research groups Earshot and Forensic Architecture has shown.

The report, based on eyewitness testimony and audio and visual analysis, shows that Israeli troops executed many of the aid workers, including shooting one from as close as a meter away.

The victims included eight aid workers with the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six from the Palestinian Civil Defense, and a UN relief agency staffer.

After ambushing the aid workers, the Israeli troops crushed the ambulances and buried them along with the bodies in a mass grave.

The report by Earshot and Forensic Architecture reconstructed the details of the massacre using video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers before their deaths, open-source images and videos, satellite imagery, social media posts, and other materials, as well as in-depth interviews with two survivors.

On 23 March 2025 at 3:52 am, the PRCS dispatched two ambulances from two different areas to the scene of an Israeli airstrike in Al-Hashashin near Rafah on the Egyptian border.

Israeli soldiers ambushed the Palestinian aid workers, firing at them 910 times in a near continuous assault lasting over two hours.

At least 93 percent of the gunshots were fired directly towards the emergency vehicles and aid workers by a group of at least 30 soldiers.

Israeli soldiers began firing on the aid workers from an elevated position on a sandbank. They then began walking toward the defenseless aid workers while continuing to shoot.

Once they reached them, they walked between the ambulances, carrying out execution-style killings at point-blank range.

“The soldiers could clearly see the aid workers, shot at them continuously and deliberately from this position and then approached to execute them one by one at close range,” Samaneh Moafi, assistant director of research at Forensic Architecture, told Drop Site News.

“Locating the massacre within the evolution of Israel’s campaign in Gaza shows that it was not an isolated incident but part of the genocide,” Moafi added.

The 15 aid workers killed were: Mustafa Khafaja, Ezz el-Din Shaat, Saleh Muammar, Refaat Radwan, Muhammad Bahloul, Ashraf Abu Libda, Muhammad al-Hila, and Raed al-Sharif with the PRCS; Zuhair Abdul Hamid al-Farra, Samir Yahya al-Bahapsa, Ibrahim Nabil al-Maghari, Fouad Ibrahim al-Jamal, Youssef Rassem Khalifa, and Anwar al-Attar with the Civil Defense; and Kamal Mohammed Shahtout with UNRWA.

After the mass grave was discovered and news of the massacre emerged, Israeli authorities attempted to cover it up.

“Following our discovery of the mass grave, the narrative from Israeli forces shifted multiple times; we were fed several versions of a blatant lie,” stated Jonathan Whittall, a senior UN official in Palestine between 2022 and 2025.

“The men we retrieved on Eid last year were medics. We found them in their uniforms, ready to save lives, only to be killed by Israeli forces, fully aware of their protected status.”

February 23, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism