DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: Palestinians held funerals Monday for 15 medics and emergency responders killed by Israeli troops in southern Gaza, after their bodies and mangled ambulances were found buried in an impromptu mass grave, apparently plowed over by Israeli military bulldozers.
The Palestinian Red Crescent says the slain workers and their vehicles were clearly marked as medical and humanitarian personnel and accused Israeli troops of killing them “in cold blood.” The Israeli military says its troops opened fire on vehicles that approached them “suspiciously” without identification.
The dead included eight Red Crescent workers, six members of Gaza’s Civil Defense emergency unit and a staffer from UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestinians. The International Red Cross/Red Crescent said it was the deadliest attack on its personnel in eight years.
Since the war in Gaza began 18 months ago, Israel has killed more than 100 Civil Defense workers and more than 1,000 health workers, according to the UN
Here is what we know about what happened.
Missing for days
The emergency teams had been missing since March 23, when they went at around noon to retrieve casualties after Israeli forces launched an offensive into the Tel Al-Sultan district of the southern city of Rafah.
The military had called for an evacuation of the area earlier that day, saying Hamas militants were operating there. Alerts by the Civil Defense at the time said displaced Palestinians sheltering in the area had been hit and a team that went to rescue them was “surrounded by Israeli troops.”
“The available information indicates that the first team was killed by Israeli forces on 23 March,” the UN said in a statement Sunday night.
Further emergency teams that went to rescue the first team were “struck one after another over several hours,” it said. All the teams went out during daylight hours, according to the Civil Defense.
The Israeli military said Sunday that on March 23, troops opened fire on vehicles that were “advancing suspiciously” toward them without emergency signals.
It said “an initial assessment” determined that the troops killed a Hamas operative named Mohammed Amin Shobaki and eight other militants. Israel has struck ambulances and other emergency vehicles in the past, accusing Hamas militants of using them for transportation.
However, none of the dead staffers from the Red Crescent and Civil Defense had that name, and no other bodies were reported found at the site, raising questions over the military’s suggestion that alleged militants were among the rescue workers.
The military did not immediately respond to requests for the names of the other alleged militants killed or for comment on how the emergency workers came to be buried.
After a ceasefire that lasted roughly two months, Israel relaunched its military campaign in Gaza on March 18. Since then, bombardment and new ground assaults that have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry’s count does not distinguish between militants and civilians, but it says over half those killed are women and children.
Aid workers say ambulance teams and humanitarian staff have come under fire in the renewed assault. A worker with the charity World Central Kitchen was killed Friday by an Israeli strike that hit next to a kitchen distributing free meals. A March 19 Israeli tank strike on a UN compound killed a staffer, the UN said, though Israel denies being behind the blast.
Mass grave
For days, Israeli forces would not allow access to the site where the emergency teams disappeared, the UN said.
On Wednesday, a UN convoy tried to reach the site but encountered Israeli troops opening fire on people.
The convoy saw a woman who had been shot lying in the road. The dashboard video shows staff talking about retrieving the woman. Then two people are seen walking across the road. Gunfire rings out and they flee. One stumbles, apparently wounded, before he is shot and falls onto his face to the ground. The UN said the team retrieved the body of the woman and left.
On Sunday, the UN said teams were able to reach the site after the Israeli military informed it where it had buried the bodies, in a barren area on the edges of Tel Al-Sultan. Footage released by the UN shows workers from PRCS and Civil Defense, wearing masks and bright orange vests, digging through hills of dirt that appeared to have been piled up by Israeli bulldozers.
The footage shows them digging out multiple bodies wearing orange emergency vests. Some of the bodies are found piled on top of each other. At one point, they pull out a body in a Civil Defense vest out of the dirt, and it is revealed to be a torso with no legs. Several ambulances and a UN vehicle, all heavily damaged or torn apart, are also buried in the dirt.
“Their bodies were gathered and buried in this mass grave,” said Jonathan Whittall, with the UN humanitarian office OCHA, speaking at the site in the video. “We’re digging them out in their uniforms, with their gloves on. They were here to save lives.”
“It’s absolute horror what has happened here,” he said.
Funerals
A giant crowd gathered on Monday outside the morgue of Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis as the bodies of the eight slain PRCS workers were brought out for funerals. Their bodies were laid out on stretchers wrapped in white cloth with the Red Crescent logo on it and their photos, as family and others held funeral prayers over them. Funerals for the seven others followed.
“They were killed in cold blood by the Israeli occupation, despite the clear nature of their humanitarian mission,” Raed Al-Nimis, the Red Crescent spokesperson in Gaza, told the AP.
Israeli troops have killed at least 30 Red Crescent medics over the course of the war. Among them were two killed in February 2024 when they tried to rescue Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old girl who was killed along with six other relatives when they were trapped in their car under Israeli fire in northern Gaza.
From Geneva, the head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Jagan Chapagain, said the staffer killed last week “wore emblems that should have protected them; their ambulances were clearly marked.”
“All humanitarians must be protected,” he said.
Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinian medics and buried them in a mass grave, UN says
https://arab.news/b2zbj
Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinian medics and buried them in a mass grave, UN says
- Dead included 8 Red Crescent workers, 6 members of Civil Defense emergency unit and UNRWA staffer
WHO warns of permanent impact of hunger on a generation of Gazans
GENEVA: Malnutrition rates are rising in Gaza, emergency treatments to counter it are running out and hunger could have a lasting impact on “an entire generation,” a World Health Organization official said on Tuesday.
Israel has blockaded supplies into the enclave since early March, when it resumed its devastating military campaign against Hamas, and a global hunger monitor on Monday warned that half a million people there faced starvation.
WHO representative for the Occupied Palestinian Territory Rik Peeperkorn said he had seen children who looked years younger than their age and visited a north Gaza hospital where over 20 percent of children screened suffered from acute malnutrition.
“What we see is an increasing trend in generalized acute malnutrition,” Peeperkorn told a press briefing by video link from Deir Al-Balah. “I’ve seen a child that’s five years old, and you would say it was two-and-a-half.”
“Without enough nutritious food, clean water and access to health care, an entire generation will be permanently affected,” he said, warning of stunting and impaired cognitive development.
The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency Philippe Lazzarini told the BBC that he thought Israel was denying food and aid to civilians as a weapon of war.
The WHO criticized it in a statement late on Monday as “grossly inadequate” to meet the population’s immediate needs.
Due to the blockade, WHO only has enough stocks to treat 500 children with acute malnutrition, which is only a fraction of what is needed, Peeperkorn said.
Already, 55 children have died of acute malnutrition, he said.
UN aid chief slams Israel’s Gaza aid plan as ‘cynical sideshow’
- “We have rigorous mechanisms to ensure our aid gets to civilians and not to Hamas, but Israel denies us access,” said Fletcher
- No aid has been delivered to Gaza since March 2
UNITED NATIONS: United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher on Tuesday said an Israeli plan aid distribution in the Gaza Strip was a “cynical sideshow, a deliberate distraction, a fig leaf for further violence and displacement” of Palestinians in the enclave.
He told the UN Security Council that no food, medicine, water or tents have entered the war-torn Palestinian enclave for more than 10 weeks.
“We can save hundreds of thousands of survivors. We have rigorous mechanisms to ensure our aid gets to civilians and not to Hamas, but Israel denies us access, placing the objective of depopulating Gaza before the lives of civilians,” said Fletcher.
No aid has been delivered to Gaza since March 2. Israel has said it would not allow the entry of goods and supplies into Gaza until Palestinian militant group Hamas releases all remaining hostages.
At the end of last month the UN World Food Programme said it had run out of food stocks in Gaza, and US President Donald Trump said that he pushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow the delivery of food and medicine.
Fletcher said the UN has met more than a dozen times with Israeli authorities to discuss their proposed aid distribution model “to find a way to make it possible,” stressing the minimum conditions needed for UN involvement. Those included the ability to deliver aid to all those in need wherever they are.
“The Israeli-designed distribution modality is not the answer,” he told the 15-member council.
“It forces further displacement. It exposes thousands of people to harm ... It restricts aid to only one part of Gaza while leaving other dire needs unmet. It makes aid conditional on political and military aims. It makes starvation a bargaining chip,” Fletcher said.
COGAT, the Israeli military agency that coordinates aid, met with UN agencies and international aid groups in early April and proposed “a structured monitoring and aid entry mechanism.”
“The mechanism is designed to support aid organizations, enhance oversight and accountability, and ensure that assistance reaches the civilian population in need, rather than being diverted and stolen by Hamas,” COGAT posted on X on April 3.
The war in Gaza was triggered on October 7, 2023, when Hamas killed 1,200 people in southern Israel, and took some 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Since then, more than 52,700 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza health authorities.
Syria says US lifting of sanctions ‘pivotal turning point’
- Syria welcomed US President Donald Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on the country
- Celebrations broke out in the capital Damascus and across the country
DAMASCUS: Syria on Tuesday welcomed US President Donald Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on the country, calling it a “pivotal turning point,” as celebrations broke out in Damascus.
The Syrian foreign ministry said in a statement that the country welcomed Trump’s announcement, calling it a “pivotal turning point for the Syrian people, as we seek to emerge from a long and painful chapter of war.”
“The removal of those sanctions offers a vital opportunity for Syria to pursue stability, self-sufficiency, and meaningful national reconstruction, led by and for the Syrian people,” the statement added.
In a speech given in Riyadh amidst Trump’s trip to the Middle East, the US president said he “will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness.”
Ever since overthrowing longtime ruler Bashar Assad in December, Syria’s new rulers have been pushing Western states to lift sanctions imposed on the country largely during the former president’s rule.
During his visit to Paris last week, Syrian interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa said there was no justification for maintaining European sanctions imposed against the Assad government.
“These sanctions were imposed on the previous regime because of the crimes it committed, and this regime is gone,” Sharaa said in a press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron.
“With the removal of the regime, these sanctions should be removed as well, and there is no justification for keeping the sanctions,” he added.
US sanctions have isolated Syria from the global financial system and imposed a range of economic restrictions on the government throughout more than a decade of civil war.
The lingering sanctions have widely been seen as a major obstacle to Syria’s economic recovery and post-war reconstruction.
Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani expressed “gratitude” to Saudi Arabia for its role in pushing for the lifting of the sanctions.
Celebration across Syria
Finance Minister Mohammed Barnieh said Trump’s lifting of sanctions “will help Syria in building its institutions, providing essential services to the people and will create great opportunities to attract investment and restore confidence in Syria’s future.”
Syrians met the news with joy and celebration, with dozens of men, women and children gathering in Damascus’s Umayyad Square. They blasted music while others drove by in their cars waving Syrian flags.
“My joy is great, this decision will definitely affect the entire country positively. Construction will return, the displaced will return, and prices will go down,” said Huda Qassar, a 33-year-old English language teacher, celebrating with her compatriots.
In the northern province of Idlib, manufacturer Bassam Al-Ahmed, 39, said he was very happy about the lifting of US sanctions.
“It is the right of the Syrian people, after 14 years of war and 50 years of the Assads’ oppression, to live through stability and safety,” he said.
“The most important thing is economic stability, which cannot be achieved without lifting American sanctions to increase investment opportunities within Syria and encourage people to work, in addition to securing raw materials and many products that Syria has been deprived of due to sanctions,” he added.
Iran says it’s open to temporary uranium enrichment limits
- Iran described Sunday’s talks as “difficult but useful” while a senior US official said Washington was “encouraged” and both sides confirmed plans for future negotiations
TEHRAN: Iran is open to accepting temporary limits on its uranium enrichment, its deputy foreign minister said Tuesday, while adding that talks with the US have yet to address such specifics.
Tehran and Washington on Sunday held their fourth round of nuclear talks, which kicked off last month, marking their highest-level contact since the US in 2018 pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal.
“For a limited period of time, we can accept a series of restrictions on the level and volume of enrichment,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi.
“We have not yet gone into details about the level and volume of enrichment,” he said, quoted by Tasnim news agency.
Iran currently enriches uranium to 60 percent purity — far above the 3.67 percent limit set in the 2015 deal but below the 90 percent needed for weapons-grade material.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that Iran was the only country in the world without nuclear weapons that enriches uranium to that level.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said at the latest talks that the right to enrich uranium was “non-negotiable,” while US chief negotiator Steve Witkoff called it a “red line.”
The Islamic republic began rolling back its commitments to the deal a year after the US withdrawal.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has revived his “maximum pressure” approach against Tehran. While backing nuclear diplomacy, he also warned of potential military action if it fails.
Iran described Sunday’s talks as “difficult but useful” while a senior US official said Washington was “encouraged” and both sides confirmed plans for future negotiations.
The talks are being held in “full coordination” with the supreme leader, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said, according to a presidency statement on Tuesday.
“In the negotiations, we will not retreat from our principles in any way, but at the same time, we do not want tensions,” he added.
Also on Tuesday, Iran’s atomic energy agency chief, Mohammad Eslami, described the country’s nuclear industry as its “wealth and strength,” according to ISNA news agency.
Despite the talks, Washington has continued to impose sanctions targeting Iran’s nuclear program and oil industry, with the latest announced on Monday.
“There is no doubt that there is a lot of pressure on us,” said Ali Larijani, a close adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, while noting that not all of Iran’s problems were due to the sanctions.
Lebanese PM reviews security measures at Beirut airport
- UNIFIL forces announce discovery of more than 225 weapon caches south of Litani River
BEIRUT: Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam made an unexpected visit to Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport on Tuesday to review flight and safety measures.
The premier highlighted his commitment to maintaining the facility as a bright gateway for Lebanon to the world.
Salam, accompanied by Minister of Public Works and Transport Fayez Rasamny, held a meeting with airport security chief Brig. Gen. Fadi Kfoury and other officials.
According to Salam’s media office, the airport officials briefed him “on the measures implemented to enhance security and safety at the airport, facilitate the entry and exit of travelers, expedite transit operations, reduce waiting times and improve the overall travel experience.”
The visit fulfilled a request by the ambassadors of Gulf countries to Lebanon, who held a meeting with Salam last week to encourage the return of Gulf tourists to Lebanon.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun concluded his visit to Kuwait on Monday, which included discussions with Emir Sheikh Mishal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah at Bayan Palace. The emir highlighted Kuwait’s commitment to strengthening Lebanese-Gulf and Arab relations.
Lebanon has a historic opportunity to define its future and overcome all past challenges, he said.
According to a statement from the Lebanese presidency, the Kuwaiti emir expressed “Kuwait’s satisfaction with the results of the meeting of the ambassadors of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries with the Lebanese prime minister, which discussed the return of GCC citizens to Lebanon.”
Al-Sabah also praised the security cooperation between the two countries and condemned Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
Meanwhile, UNIFIL forces on Monday announced the discovery of more than 225 weapon caches south of the Litani River.
All weapons were transferred to Lebanese military authorities.
A UNIFIL statement said that the Lebanese Armed Forces have reestablished a presence at more than 120 permanent positions throughout southern Lebanon with peacekeeping support.
However, complete border deployment remains hindered by Israel’s “military presence on Lebanese territory.”
