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The Israeli military has admitted to “professional failures” and said it would sack an officer, after an incident in which its forces killed 15 unarmed emergency workers in southern Gaza last month.
Israeli forces shot dead the paramedics and first responders in the early hours of March 23, before crushing the ambulances, fire truck and UN vehicle in which they had been travelling. They then buried the dead in a shallow grave.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society — for whom eight of the dead worked — described the killings as a “massacre”. Volker Türk, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, said the incident raised “further concerns over the commission of war crimes by the Israeli military”.
The Israeli military said on Sunday that its investigation had identified “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report” what had happened.
But it denied an attempt to cover up, and said troops had not fired indiscriminately or executed any of the dead. In addition to the Red Crescent paramedics, the victims included six members of Gaza’s civil defence and one UN worker.
The Israel Defense Forces has had to change multiple elements of its account of what happened after details emerged contradicting its earlier versions.
The IDF initially claimed its soldiers had fired on the convoy because it was moving “suspiciously towards [Israeli] troops” and “without prior co-ordination and without headlights or emergency signals”.
However, it admitted this claim was inaccurate after footage recovered from the mobile phone of one of the dead paramedics showed that the ambulances and fire engine had been clearly marked and, when they came under fire, had their lights and emergency signals on.
The IDF said on Sunday that a commanding officer would be reprimanded, while a deputy commander would be dismissed.
Major-General Yoav Har-Even, who conducted the investigation, said part of the reason the deputy commander had been dismissed was “mistakes” in his account of the killings.
The IDF said the killings had taken place in three incidents within the space of a couple of hours. First, troops opened fire on an ambulance they had misidentified as a Hamas vehicle. Then they fired on a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck that had come to find the people killed in the first incident. Finally, they fired on a UN vehicle that arrived on the scene.
“The examination determined that the fire in the first two incidents resulted from an operational misunderstanding by the troops, who believed they faced a tangible threat from enemy forces. The third incident involved a breach of orders during a combat setting,” the military said.
Har-Even confirmed that none of the people killed had been armed and that no weapons had been found.
However, the military again alleged, without providing evidence to support its claim, that six of the victims had been Hamas militants. It did not name any of them.
It had previously claimed that a militant called Mohammad Shubaki had been killed in the incident, before having to drop this claim after it became clear that he was not among the dead.
An official said the inaccurate claim was based on a mistaken identification by field-intelligence operatives that was corrected by more senior officials.
The Red Crescent said last week that a paramedic who survived the attack was being held in Israeli custody. The military confirmed on Sunday that this was the case, but did not provide further details.
The Israeli offensive in Gaza has so far killed more than 51,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, as well as creating a humanitarian crisis.
Israel launched the offensive in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, during which militants killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and took 250 hostage.
