The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) unit involved in the killings of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers in the Gaza Strip last month was under the command of a brigade led by a notorious Israeli general previously accused by some of his own troops of having “contempt for human life”.
The IDF has confirmed that troops from Golani, one of the army’s five infantry brigades, opened fire on two convoys of ambulances in Rafah on 23 March and dug a mass grave to cover the bodies of those killed until the corpses could be retrieved by a UN team six days later. It has disputed allegations from two witnesses who exhumed the bodies and newly released postmortem results that found several of those killed had close-range gunshot wounds to the head and chest and were discovered with their hands or legs tied.
Field operatives from Unit 504, a military intelligence unit with a reputation for cruelty and reckless behaviour, including torture, were also present during the attack, a senior military intelligence source with knowledge of recent IDF deployments in southern Gaza told the Guardian. The Israeli military declined to comment on whether 504 was involved.
During the Rafah attack, the Golani troops were under the command of the reservist Armoured 14th Brigade. The 14th Brigade is part of a division led by Brig Gen Yehuda Vach, who former officers say designated an unofficial “kill zone” elsewhere in the strip which resulted in the arbitrary killings of Palestinian civilians. Soldiers also alleged Vach’s “lack of operational discipline” endangered soldiers’ lives.
Vach has also told troops “there are no innocents in Gaza”, according to an investigation by the Israeli daily Haaretz.
In a video of Golani troops being briefed before their redeployment to Gaza earlier this month, aired by Israel’s Channel 14, a battalion commander appeared to endorse an open-fire policy, telling the soldiers: “Anyone you encounter there is an enemy. You identify anyone, you eliminate him.”
Golani soldiers have previously been accused of war crimes in the conflict, including killing civilians, degrading treatment of bodies, needless destruction of civilian infrastructure, and incitement to genocide.
A song written by a member of the brigade’s 51st Battalion in the aftermath of the Hamas 7 October 2023 attack on Israel that ignited the war has become an unofficial anthem for many soldiers. The chorus’s lyrics include: “For what you did to the nation of Israel, Golani is coming with gasoline … Gaza will burn.”
The accompanying music video features footage from Golani operations in Gaza in which the brigade’s yellow and green standard can clearly be seen.
Many of the allegations against Golani troops were compiled from social media photo and video footage posted online by the soldiers themselves and cited in legal filings by the Hind Rajab Foundation, a non-profit that aims to hold Israeli military personnel accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israeli officials say the two founders of the Belgium-based organisation have a history of extremist views.
The presence of Unit 504 was also backed up by the account of the sole survivor of the massacre, the Red Crescent volunteer Munther Abed, and official photos and video of recent IDF operations in Rafah.
The unit has conducted thousands of interrogations of captives from Gaza during the war, and differs from other Israeli military intelligence outfits in that the soldiers are combat troops, operating at a battalion level, who speak fluent Arabic.
According to Abed, a 27-year-old ambulance service volunteer, troops he described as looking like “special forces … armed with rifles, green lasers, and night-vision goggles” dragged him out of the emergency vehicle after it was shot at continuously for five minutes, killing the driver and paramedic he was travelling with.
The uniform description could match either Golani commandos or that of Unit 504 field operatives.
Abed said he was then stripped to his underwear, with his hands bound behind his back, and threatened, suffocated and beaten during several hours of interrogation.
Last week, the Israeli military backtracked on its account of the killings of the paramedics after footage emerged which contradicted its claims that the Red Crescent vehicles were not marked as emergency vehicles and were not using headlights or flashing lights when troops opened fire.
The IDF has said that between six and nine of the medics had links to Hamas, without providing evidence. None of those killed – eight Red Crescent staff, six members of the Gaza civil defence agency and one employee of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees – were armed. One Red Crescent employee is still missing.
The Israeli army chief, Lt Gen Eyal Zamir, has since ordered a second, more in-depth investigation into the attack.
Over 18 months of war Israeli forces have killed hundreds of medical workers and the staff of aid agencies and UN organisations in Gaza. In April last year, seven members of the charity World Central Kitchen died in a sustained Israeli attack on their clearly marked vehicles.
Human rights organisations have long accused the Israeli military of a culture of impunity, with few soldiers ever facing justice. In 2023, fewer than 1% of complaints made against Israeli troops’ actions in the occupied Palestinian territories ended in a conviction, according to the latest US state department annual human rights report.
Earlier this week, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society called for an international investigation into the incident, which was the deadliest for members of the International Committee of the Red Cross since six workers were shot and killed in 2017 in an Islamic State ambush in Afghanistan.
