A week after a group of aid workers disappeared in Gaza’s southern town of Rafah, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) says they are believed to have been “executed” by Israeli forces.
A group of 15 paramedics and rescue workers from PRCS and Gaza’s Civil Defense “vanished" on March 22 in the Tal Sultan neighborhood in Rafah following an incident in which Israeli forces fired on ambulances and fire trucks.
They had arrived in response to an Israeli bombing in Rafah.
In a Saturday statement, PRCS said, "So far, no trace of our team members has been found.”
“Yesterday (March 28), we discovered the four ambulance vehicles completely destroyed and buried in the sand,” PRCS said, adding that they are believed to have been executed.
Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said that the body of one emergency worker had been found.
Basal said that when Civil Defense and Red Crescent teams were finally granted access to the area, they found “massive destruction” and widespread bulldozing.
“We found our vehicles and the Red Crescent vehicles destroyed,” and subsequently, the body of one worker that had been buried by bulldozers was retrieved, he added.
In a report on Saturday, al-Jazeera also cited witnesses as saying that Israeli forces had killed and buried the team of paramedics and rescue workers who went to Rafah last week.
Israel’s military said in a statement that on that day, its forces had opened fire at “suspicious vehicles” advancing toward troops without prior coordination.
Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said it was “a deliberate and brutal massacre against civil defense and Palestinian Red Crescent teams in the city of Rafah.”
Since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, 19 PRCS members have been killed while on duty, according to the society.
“We cannot bear to add more names to this tragic list,” a spokesperson for the society said Thursday.
In a separate incident, Israeli forces killed one member of the World Central Kitchen (WCK) and injured six others “as meals were being distributed” in Gaza on Thursday.
Press TV’s website
