Israel’s military admitted on Saturday it had fired on ambulances in the Gaza Strip after identifying them as “suspicious vehicles”, with Hamas condemning it as a war crime that killed at least one person.
The incident took place last Sunday in the Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood in the southern city of Rafah, close to the Egyptian border.
Israeli troops launched an offensive there on 20 March, two days after the army resumed aerial bombardments of Gaza after an almost two-month-long truce. Attacks on medical staff, hospitals and ambulances are potential war crimes.
Israeli troops had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists”, the military claimed in a statement to Agence France-Presse.
“A few minutes afterward, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops … The troops responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles, eliminating a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.”
The military did not say if there was fire coming from the vehicles.
It added that “after an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles … were ambulances and fire trucks”, and condemned what it claimed was “the repeated use” by “terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes”.
The day after the incident, Gaza’s civil defence agency said in a statement that it had not heard from a team of six rescuers from Tal al-Sulta who had been urgently dispatched to respond to deaths and injuries.
On Friday, it reported finding the body of the team leader and the rescue vehicles – an ambulance and a firefighting vehicle – and said a vehicle from the Palestine Red Crescent Society was also “reduced to a pile of scrap metal”.
Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, accused Israel of carrying out “a deliberate and brutal massacre against civil defence and Palestinian Red Crescent teams in the city of Rafah”.
“The targeted killing of rescue workers – who are protected under international humanitarian law – constitutes a flagrant violation of the Geneva conventions and a war crime,” he said.
Tom Fletcher, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said since 18 March, “Israeli airstrikes in densely populated areas have killed hundreds of children and other civilians”.
“Patients killed in their hospital beds. Ambulances shot at. First responders killed,” he said.
“If the basic principles of humanitarian law still count, the international community must act while it can to uphold them.”
On Friday, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) mourned the killing of Osama Al-Bali, a paramedic who served at MAP’s Solidarity polyclinic in Gaza.
‘‘Osama, his wife, and their 13-year-old son were killed on 27 March 2025 when Israeli forces shelled their tent in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza,’’ read a statement from Map. ‘‘His brother’s family was also killed in the attack. MAP unequivocally condemns this attack and demands the immediate protection of all healthcare workers and civilians in Gaza.’’
According to data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Last week, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) condemned Israel’s killing of a Palestinian worker affiliated with the group in Gaza. MSF issued a statement announcing the death of 29-year-old Alaa Abd-Elsalam Ali Okal, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his apartment building in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah.
Last December, four doctors were killed at Kamal Adwan hospital in besieged northern Gaza, after Israeli forces stormed the compound, killing and injuring dozens of people in surrounding areas.
Israel has long claimed that Hamas was using ambulances to carry out their military operations.
However, last January, the Israeli army admitted that its forces had also used an ambulance to infiltrate the Balata refugee camp in the city of Nablus, in the occupied West Bank.
Five armed Israeli soldiers emerged from the vehicle and took part in a raid that resulted in the deaths of two civilians, one of them an 80-year-old woman.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
