Aletho News

Video footage refutes IOF account of attack that killed 15 Gaza medics

Al Mayadeen | April 5, 2025

A video retrieved from the cell phone of a Palestinian paramedic, whose body was discovered alongside 14 other aid workers in a mass grave in Gaza in late March, shows clearly marked ambulances and a fire truck with emergency lights activated as they came under heavy Israeli gunfire, The New York Times reported on Friday.

During a press conference at the United Nations on Friday, officials from the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), moderated by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said they had submitted the nearly seven-minute video to the UN Security Council.

Earlier in the week, Israeli military spokesperson Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani denied that Israeli forces had “randomly” attacked an ambulance. He claimed that multiple vehicles had been seen “advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals toward Israeli troops, prompting the shooting. He also claimed that nine of the individuals killed were Palestinian Resistance fighters.

The Times acquired the footage from a senior UN diplomat who requested anonymity in order to share sensitive material. The location and time of the video, captured in Rafah in southern Gaza early on March 23, were verified by the newspaper.

Vehicles clearly marked

Shot from inside a moving vehicle, the footage depicts a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck, all clearly marked and displaying both headlights and flashing emergency lights, driving southward on a road north of Rafah just after sunrise.

The convoy halts when it comes across a damaged ambulance on the roadside—an earlier vehicle sent to aid injured civilians had reportedly come under attack. The new rescue vehicles move to the side of the road. At least two uniformed rescue workers are seen exiting the fire truck and ambulance, both bearing the Red Crescent emblem, and approaching the damaged vehicle.

Suddenly, intense gunfire erupts. The barrage of bullets can be seen and heard striking the convoy. The footage shakes and then goes dark, though the audio continues for five minutes with unrelenting gunfire. A man’s voice is heard in Arabic noting the presence of Israeli soldiers.

The paramedic filming the attack is repeatedly heard reciting the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith typically spoken when facing death. He asks for forgiveness and expresses that he knows he is going to die.

“Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose — to help people,” he says.

In the background, voices of distressed aid workers and shouted commands in Hebrew are audible, though the content of the Hebrew speech remains unclear.

According to PRCS spokesperson Nebal Farsakh, speaking from Ramallah, the paramedic who filmed the video was later found with a gunshot wound to the head in the mass grave. His identity has not been made public due to concerns for the safety of his family still living in Gaza, a UN diplomat confirmed.

‘Targeted from a very close range’

At the UN headquarters press conference, PRCS President Dr. Younis al-Khatib and Deputy Marwan Jilani said the evidence they had gathered—including the video, audio, and forensic analysis of the bodies—directly contradicts the Israeli military’s account.

The disappearance and subsequent discovery of the 15 aid workers, missing since March 23, have sparked global condemnation. Both the UN and PRCS maintain that the victims were unarmed and posed no threat.

“Their bodies have been targeted from a very close range,” indicated al-Khatib, criticizing “Israel’s” failure to provide information on the missing medics. “They knew exactly where they were because they killed them.”

“Their colleagues were in agony, their families were in agony. They kept us for eight days in the dark,” he said.

It took five days of negotiation between the UN, PRCS, and the Israeli military before safe access was granted to search for the missing. On Sunday, rescue teams recovered 15 bodies, mostly buried in a shallow mass grave, alongside crushed ambulances and a UN-marked vehicle.

Al-Khatib stated that one member of the Palestinian Red Crescent remains missing, and “Israel” has not clarified whether he is in custody or has been killed.

Dr. Ahmad Dhair, a forensic doctor at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, said he examined five of the aid workers’ bodies and found four had sustained multiple gunshot wounds, including to the head, chest, and joints.

“I think the scale of this crime should force, that it should oblige the international community to do more and not to accept that this would be another incident that goes in the files and be forgotten after a few days,” Jilani underscored.

According to the UN and PRCS, one Red Crescent paramedic in the convoy survived after being detained and later released by the Israeli military, and he provided a firsthand account confirming Israeli forces had opened fire on the medical convoy.

Dylan Winder, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ representative to the UN, condemned the attack as an outrage, describing it as the deadliest incident involving Red Cross or Red Crescent workers worldwide since 2017.

Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for an independent investigation, warning that the incident raises “further concerns over the commission of war crimes by the Israeli military.”

April 5, 2025 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | 1 Comment

Euro-Med Monitor: Israel’s brutality in Gaza surpasses all recent forms of terrorism

Palestinian Information Center – April 4, 2025

GAZA – nature of Israel’s crimes in the Gaza Strip must be denounced, particularly the crimes’ horrifying scope, methodical execution, and wide-ranging effects, which surpass those of armed groups like ISIS, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said.

While the crimes committed by ISIS have been widely denounced by the international community, the same community is now mostly silent—and therefore complicit—as Israel pursues a campaign of declared genocide that aims to exterminate the Palestinian people from their homeland, the Euro-Med said.

Israeli occupation forces detonated a robot on Thursday 3 April 2025 rigged with tons of explosives in the heart of the densely populated Shuja’iyya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. The explosion occurred in an area packed with displaced civilians, though there was no military necessity and no combat activity in the vicinity. This act embodies the conduct of existing terrorist organizations, even surpassing them in brutality and disregard for human life, and bears no resemblance to the conduct of a state bound by international law, regardless of any attempts to distort or evade it.

The explosion killed 21 Palestinians and injured around 100 others, the majority of them women and children. A full residential block was obliterated with its residents still inside, and this is not an isolated incident. Over recent months—particularly in the northern Gaza Strip—Israel has increasingly used explosive-laden robots in residential neighborhoods during its ground incursions. At least 150 such detonations have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children, and caused wide-scale destruction to homes and other essential infrastructure.

A separate atrocity was committed on 23 March, when Israeli forces detained 15 Palestinian rescue workers from the Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defense, along with a United Nations staff member, before executing them extrajudicially—some while their hands were bound. Their bodies were dumped into a pit, and the ambulances they had been travelling in were destroyed. This incident is another blatant example of an intentional Israeli crime mirroring—and exceeding—the brutality of groups like ISIS, as it reveals a clear and deliberate intent to annihilate Palestinians both physically and through psychologically terrorizing residents across the Strip.

Euro-Med Monitor field teams have documented thousands of crimes committed by Israeli forces, constituting overwhelming evidence of mass atrocities. These crimes include an unprecedented pattern of violence in recent history, in terms of scale, deliberate targeting, and genocidal intent. A minimum of 58,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority of them women and children, and most have been buried beneath the rubble of homes deliberately destroyed over their heads, while many were killed by sniper fire with clear intent. Over 120,000 individuals have been injured, and at least 39,000 children have been orphaned. The Gaza Strip’s infrastructure, including homes, hospitals, and schools, has been virtually obliterated.

These acts amount to one of the most extensive and systematic campaigns of extermination in contemporary history, underscoring the urgent need for international accountability, an end to Israeli impunity, and concrete action to halt further atrocities.

Israel’s methods in the Gaza Strip—particularly its mass killing of civilians—bear a striking resemblance to the tactics used by groups the international community has widely condemned as terrorist. However, the atrocities unfolding in the Strip are far more dangerous in terms of scale, brutality, and systematic intent, and cannot be understood merely as a function of violent methods or tools.

The rights group pointed out that these actions cannot be dismissed as random or extreme policies, but rather represent a fully-fledged model of organized state terrorism, driven by a comprehensive blueprint for annihilation and implemented in full view of the international community.

“These crimes are being committed with clear, declared intent to eliminate the Palestinian people as a national and collective entity, uproot those who remain on their land, erase their identity, and ultimately end their collective existence.”

Euro-Med called all states, both individually and collectively, to fulfil their legal obligations and take urgent action to stop Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip in all its forms. This includes implementing concrete measures to protect Palestinian civilians, ensuring Israel’s compliance with international legal norms and the rulings of the International Court of Justice, and guaranteeing full accountability for perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It also stressed the importance of implementing the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against the Israeli Prime Minister and army minister at the earliest opportunity and ensure these individuals’ transfer to international justice.

Furthermore, Euro-Med called on the international community to impose comprehensive economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel in response to its grave and systematic violations of international law. This includes an arms embargo; the cessation of all political, financial, and military cooperation; asset freezes of implicated officials; travel bans; and the suspension of trade privileges and bilateral agreements that provide Israel with economic benefits, enabling its continued crimes.

April 4, 2025 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Israel uses human shields in Gaza ‘at least six times a day,’ says Israeli officer

MEMO | April 1, 2025

Israeli soldiers are reportedly using Palestinian civilians as human shields at least six times a day, according to an anonymous Israeli army officer quoted in Haaretz. The anonymous source, a senior officer in a non-reservist brigade, revealed that the practice is now so widespread it has become systematised, institutionalised and, most disturbingly, normalised within the ranks of the Israeli military.

The practice, grotesquely referred to as the “mosquito protocol”, involves forcing unarmed Palestinian civilians — often elderly men or young boys — to enter homes, tunnels or buildings ahead of Israeli soldiers to “clear” them. In reality, they are being sent into potentially booby-trapped areas or buildings suspected of harbouring resistance fighters, not to ensure safety, but simply to speed up operations. The source described the current policy as operating “a sub-army of slaves,” where almost every platoon now includes a “shawish”, a term used to refer to these coerced human shields.

The scale of the abuse is staggering. This may be one of the most damning revelations of the Gaza Genocide.

According to the officer, every company has multiple “shawishes”, meaning that dozens are used daily across brigades. These individuals are often forced to set homes ablaze or destroy property without any combat training or consent. The source admitted that the use of drones, robots or canine units — previously standard and safer — was abandoned in favour of expediency. “We forced Palestinians to act as human shields, not because it was safer for IDF troops, but because it was faster,” he said.

Despite the clear and systemic nature of the practice, Israel’s Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (MPCID) has opened just six investigations. a number that the officer called “a new low” and an obvious attempt to produce a veneer of accountability. According to the testimony, high-ranking officials, including the former IDF Chief of Staff and Southern Command leadership, have been aware of the practice since at least August 2024, and not only failed to stop it, but reportedly endorsed it as a legitimate operational strategy. The officer concluded with a chilling warning: “This procedure is a crime; even the army now admits that. And it happens daily.”

April 1, 2025 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment