1 April 2025
“This is a huge blow to
us…These people were shot,” said Jens Laerke,
spokesperson for the UN aid coordination office, OCHA.
UN human
rights chief Volker Türk issued
a statement on Monday condemning the Israeli military’s
attack, calling for an independent, prompt and thorough
investigation into the apparently systematic
killings.
“Normally we are not at a loss for
words, and we are spokespeople, but sometimes we have
difficulty finding them. This is one of those
cases,” he told journalists in
Geneva, referring to video footage taken near Tal-As-Sultan
by an OCHA rescue party showing a crushed UN vehicle,
ambulances and a fire truck that had been flattened and
buried in the sand by the Israeli military.
Rafah
mission
The clearly identified humanitarian workers
from the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Palestinian Civil
Defence and the UN Palestine refugee agency, UNRWA, had been despatched
to collect injured people on 23 March in the Rafah
area.
They came under fire from Israeli forces who
were advancing in the area, OCHA’s top official in the
Palestinian Occupied Territory said, in a detailed
post on X.
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Jonathan Whittall explained that on the
day of the attack, five ambulances, a fire truck – and a
UN vehicle which arrived following the initial assault –
were all hit by Israeli fire, after which contact was lost
with teams.
One survivor said Israeli forces had
killed both of the crew in his ambulance, Mr. Whittall said.
“For days, OCHA coordinated to reach the site but our
access was only granted five days later…After hours of
digging, we recovered one body – a civil defence worker
beneath his fire truck.”
Bodies buried in the
sand
The week-long rescue operation ended on Sunday
30 March with the recovery of the bodies of 15 humanitarian
colleagues: eight from the Palestine Red Crescent Society
(PRCS), six from the Palestinian Civil Defence (PCD) and the
UNRWA worker.
The body of one more PRCS worker is
still missing at the site, according to the International
Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC),
which on Monday repeated its calls for information from the
Israeli military.
Available information indicated that
the first team had been killed by Israeli forces on 23
March; the other emergency and aid crews were struck one
after another over several hours as they searched for their
missing colleagues, OCHA said.
High Commissioner for
Human Rights Türk said in his statement that the discovery
of the bodies buried next to their “clearly destroyed”
vehicles was “deeply disturbing”.
“This raises
significant questions with regard to the conduct of the
Israeli army during and in the aftermath of the
incident,” he added.
The fate and whereabouts
of the missing PRCS worker must be clarified, he
stressed.
On Monday, UN relief chief Tom Fletcher demanded
“answers and justice” from the Israeli military.
408
aid workers killed
According to UNRWA, 408 aid
workers including more than 280 UNRWA staff have been killed
in Gaza since the war began on 7 October
2023.
Additional video footage released by OCHA taken
from within a UN vehicle near the site of last Sunday’s
incident also showed two people walking and then running to
escape sniper fire.
According to OCHA, a woman was
shot in the back of the head and a young man trying to
retrieve her was also shot. The OCHA team managed to recover
her body in the UN vehicle.
Despite a demand for
“answers and justice” from Israel by the UN’s
emergency relief chief Tom Fletcher, no information
has yet been provided, his office said.
“We
keep engaging with the Israeli authorities daily on this and
on other burning matters including, importantly, the
critical need to reopen crossings for supplies,” said Mr.
Laerke. “Because while this is a huge blow to us
on all levels, the crisis itself, just moves on and gets
worse every day.”
Atrocity crimes
warning
The development comes days after the UN
agency warned that acts of war in Gaza “bear the hallmarks
of atrocity crimes”, with hundreds of children and other
civilians killed in Israeli airstrikes in intensely
populated areas and hospital patients “killed in their
beds, ambulances shot at and first responders
killed”.
James Elder, spokesperson for the UN
Children’s Fund, UNICEF,
condemned “unprecedented breaches” of international
humanitarian law (IHL) in Gaza linked to the resumption of
Israeli bombardment and ground operations inside the
shattered enclave.
Every day since the ceasefire
between Hamas and Israel broke down on 18 March with heavy
Israeli strikes, “100 children have been killed
and maimed every single day since that moment”,
Mr. Elder insisted.
Will-power alone will not help
anyone survive “when we see breach after breach of IHL,
breach after breach of restricting aid,” the UNICEF
spokesperson continued, four weeks since the Israeli
authorities shut Gaza’s borders to all commercial and
humanitarian aid.
Echoing those concerns, IFRC’s Mr.
Della Longa reported that hospitals “are literally
overwhelmed” and running out of medicine and medical
equipment.
The IFRC spokesperson also warned
that a lack of fuel or damage have put “more than half”
of ambulance teams of the Palestine Red Crescent out of
action.
