Israel says its soldiers shot and killed “terrorists” in a convoy of vehicles advancing in the dark. According to an eyewitness interviewed by NBC News and video recovered from the phone of one of the victims, the ambulance lights were on and the emergency vehicles clearly marked when Israeli soldiers opened fire, killing 15 emergency workers.
The footage, provided to NBC News by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society on Saturday, shows a darkened road in southern Gaza bathed in the headlights of a moving vehicle. An ambulance, its emergency lights flashing and marked with the insignia of the medical aid organization, approached another vehicle stranded on the roadside.
As the convoy slows down, the windshield where Rifat Radwan, the paramedic shooting the footage, shatters. He exits the vehicle, the camera shaking as he falls to the ground and the screen goes black. Over nearly five minutes, Radwan could be heard repeating a prayer as the gunfire intensifies, before his voice fades and the camera falls still.
Radwan’s body was recovered from a shallow mass grave near Rafah, a week after he was killed on March 23, along with his phone that contained this footage, the bodies of the 14 other humanitarian workers killed in the attack, and their crushed ambulances.
The video was originally obtained and verified by The New York Times, and shown by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society at a news conference at United Nations headquarters in New York. The organization called for an independent investigation into the killing of health workers, who are protected under international humanitarian law, with the society accusing Israeli forces of committing a war crime.
In a statement issued shortly after their bodies were recovered from the mass grave, the Red Crescent Society said the targeting of the medics “can only be considered a war crime punishable under international humanitarian law, which the occupation continues to violate before the eyes of the entire world.”
The Israel Defense Forces told NBC News last week that it did not “randomly attack an ambulance,” and that vehicles approaching Israeli soldiers did so without headlights or emergency signals.
According to the IDF, it fired on the convoy of ambulances because they were “advancing suspiciously,” and that it had killed a Hamas operative and “eight other terrorists.”
In response to the video's release, the IDF said it will investigate "all claims" and review "the documentation circulating about the incident."
Munzer Abed, a paramedic with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, survived the attack. He told NBC News the ambulance lights were on long before the attack started.
Abed said the team had received a call about an attack in Rafah’s El-Hashasheen neighborhood, so they readied their ambulance, turning on both “interior and exterior lights,” and made sure their uniforms were visible.
“I dropped to the ground,” Abed recalled in an interview with NBC News, describing the moment a round of shooting began. “I couldn’t see my two colleagues in the ambulance, but I heard their final breaths as they died.”
Abed said he survived that attack by lying on the floor in the back of his ambulance.
Dr. Ahmad Dheir, a forensic pathologist at Nasser Medical Center, examined 13 of the bodies recovered from the shallow grave, including members of the Red Crescent and Gaza’s civil defense. “A few of the bodies had gunshot wounds in the back of the head,” he told NBC News.
Civil defense video provided to NBC News last week showed dead bodies unearthed in a shallow grave. Eight Palestinian medics, six civil defense first responders and a U.N. staff member were among those recovered from the grave. Their deaths brought the total number of aid workers killed in Gaza to 408, according to the U.N.
One paramedic, Assad al-Nassasra, remains missing, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
Abed told NBC News that he was detained alongside al-Nassasra the morning after the attack, and that they were blindfolded and cuffed the last time that he was with him. Abed said that he was eventually told to leave, but that al-Nassasra was left in a cell.
The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the whereabouts of al-Nassasra.
“We never enter red zones without coordination,” Abed said. “We were in a humanitarian zone.”