Key points
- At least one person was killed in the attack
- The incident took place last Sunday in Tal al-Sultan
- Israeli troops launched an offensive there on March 20
ISLAMABAD: Israel’s military admitted Saturday it had fired on ambulances in the Gaza Strip, 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 March 20, two days after the army resumed aerial bombardments of Gaza following an almost two-month-long truce.
Israeli troops had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists”, the military said in a statement to AFP.
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”.
“Flagrant violation”
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.
The Guardian reported that Tom Fletcher, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that since March 18, “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 in a statement.
“If the basic principles of humanitarian law still count, the international community must act while it can to uphold them.”
