On Sunday, the Israeli military admitted to opening fire on ambulances in the Gaza Strip, claiming they were identified as “suspicious vehicles”. The incident occurred in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah, near the Egyptian border, where Israeli troops launched an offense two days after resuming aerial bombardments of Gaza. Attacks on medical staff, hospitals, and ambulances are considered possible war crimes. The military stated that their forces had targeted Hamas vehicles and killed several Hamas terrorists. However, they did not mention whether any shots were fired from the vehicles.

After an initial investigation, the military acknowledged that some of the targeted vehicles were ambulances and fire trucks. They accused Hamas and other militant groups in the Gaza Strip of using ambulances for terrorist activities.

Gaza’s civil defense agency stated that a team of six rescuers dispatched to the area was unaccounted for. They later found the body of the team leader and the rescue vehicles, including an ambulance and a firefighting vehicle, 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 defense and Palestinian Red Crescent teams in Rafah.

Tom Fletcher, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, stated that since 18 March, Israeli airstrikes in densely populated areas have killed hundreds of children and civilians. He also mentioned that patients were killed in their hospital beds, ambulances were shot at, and first responders were killed. He called on the international community to uphold the principles of humanitarian law if they still hold significance.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/29/israel-admits-firing-at-ambulances-in-gaza-after-palestinians-say-rescuers-missing-in-rafah