Red Crescent says Israeli troops shot Gaza crew ‘with intent to kill’

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said on Monday that 15 medics and rescuers killed by Israeli forces last month in Gaza were shot in the upper body with “intent to kill.”

The killings occurred in the southern Gaza Strip on March 23, days into a renewed Israeli offensive in the Palestinian territory, and have since sparked international condemnation.

Younis al-Khatib, president of the Red Crescent in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, told journalists in Ramallah: “There has been an autopsy of the martyrs from the Red Crescent and civil defense teams. We cannot disclose everything we know, but I will say that all the martyrs were shot in the upper part of their bodies, with the intent to kill.”

Al-Khatib called for an international probe into the killings, which the Israeli military has separately announced it was investigating.

“We call on the world to form an independent and impartial international commission of inquiry into the circumstances of the deliberate killing of the ambulance crews in the Gaza Strip,” al-Khatib said.

The Israeli military has said its soldiers fired on “terrorists” approaching them in “suspicious vehicles,” with a spokesman later adding that the vehicles had their lights off.

But a video recovered from the cellphone of one of the slain aid workers, released by the Red Crescent, appears to contradict the Israeli military’s account.

The footage shows ambulances travelling with their headlights on and emergency lights flashing.

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Those killed included eight Red Crescent staff, six members of the Gaza civil defense agency and one employee of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

The bodies were found buried near the site of the shooting in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah city, in what the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) described as a mass grave.

“Why did you hide the bodies?” al-Khatib said of the Israeli forces involved in the attack.