Israel has admitted it may have made a mistake when soldiers opened fire on unarmed Red Crescent ambulances in an incident in which 15 aid workers were killed last month.
In a briefing to journalists on Saturday night, an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) official said that soldiers had “mistakenly” identified the paramedics as a threat and that the incident was under “thorough investigation”.
He added that all claims “will be examined thoroughly and in depth in order to understand the conduct of the incident”.
The briefing took place after footage was discovered contradicting Israel’s account of the attack. The military claimed the vehicles did not have their headlights or emergency signals on and were not clearly marked with insignia. The IDF said the vehicles looked “suspicious” and were carrying nine Hamas and Islamic Jihad gunmen.
But the footage, which was rescued from the phone of a paramedic found in a mass grave in Gaza a week later and published by the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), shows a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck driving in the dark, clearly distinguishable by their flashing red and blue emergency lights, before coming under intense gunfire for several minutes.
The bodies of the 15 aid workers, including eight medics from the PRCS and a UN employee, were found a week later in a shallow grave north of Rafah, underneath their mangled vehicles.
In the late-night briefing after the footage was made public on Saturday, the IDF spokesman said that the force commander believed there were no lights in the vehicles but admitted there was a gap in the report.
The spokesman said that there was no “intentional” lie.
The IDF said it “acknowledges that its statement claiming that the ambulances had their lights off was incorrect, and was based on the testimony from the soldiers in the incident”.
The statement said that the ambulances arrived in the area shortly after a Hamas police vehicle drove through. When they arrived, “the soldiers opened fire thinking they were a threat”.
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The military official added that ambulances have previously been used by Hamas to transport its militants. He used the example of ambulances being used to infiltrate the Erez crossing on the October 7 attacks.
The footage, which is nearly seven minutes long, has been presented to the UN security council. The PRCS said that the footage “unequivocally refutes the occupation’s claims that Israeli forces did not randomly target ambulances, and that some vehicles had approached ‘suspiciously without lights or emergency markings’”.
The aid organisation said that the incident was the single deadliest attack against Red Cross or Red Crescent workers in several years.
Munther Abed, 27, was the lone survivor of the attack. A volunteer paramedic since 2015, he told The Sunday Times how the group had received a dispatch call about a strike in the Al-Hashashin neighbourhood in Rafah.
“Immediately, we turned on the ambulance, with all external and internal lights and we were wearing our official paramedic uniforms,” he said. “I was in the back of the ambulance with my colleagues.”
Abed said that on their way to the location they were “directly fired upon”, and he dropped to the floor of the ambulance. “I didn’t hear any voices from my colleagues, only the sound of their last breath. I couldn’t see if they were injured or killed, it was pitch black.”
He added: “Suddenly, I heard people speaking Hebrew, the army came, opened the ambulance door and arrested me.”
When the bodies were found a week later, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said that the bodies had been “discarded in shallow graves”. One member of the PRCS, Assad Al-Nasarah, a father of six, is still missing.
“They were humanitarians. They wore emblems. They should have been protected,” Dylan Winder, the representative of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to the UN, said on Friday.
A spokesman for the International Committee of Red Cross and Red Crescent confirmed that the organisation had no intention to withdraw aid workers from Gaza in light of recent threats to their safety.
“Our top priority is the evacuation and treatment of war wounded in the hospitals [operated by] the ICRC,” he said.
