Five ambulances, a fire truck and a UN vehicle were attacked in the area of Tel as-Sultan, one of eight Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, on March 23, according to UN Organization for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) officials. The vehicles were struck one after the other and all the occupants were killed. The brutal event was documented by a video of the body recovery, with even the vehicles being buried by the Israeli army.
OCHA, established in 1992 as a UN organization for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, has its headquarters in Geneva and New York City. According to an OCHA website article, 15 bodies were exhumed from a mass grave discovered by March 30. The International Red Cross has expressed its outrage, stating that eight Palestinian medics, six civil defense workers and a UN employee were killed by Israeli forces in the southern Gaza Strip.
A detailed article on the event on the OCHA website states that a complex, one-week rescue operation ended with the recovery of the bodies of 15 colleagues: eight from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, six from the Palestinian Civil Defense and one from the United Nations.
The article also provides a seven-minute video showing UN personnel, with clear identification of the convoy through flags and markings on the vehicles, on the way through the completely destroyed area. The transcript of the live conversation in the vehicle and the observation of the occupants, reads, among other things, that a woman was shot in the back of the head and a young man, who tried to retrieve her, was also shot. The OCHA team managed to recover her body in the UN vehicle.
Later in the video, scenes of the recovery of the missing relief workers and colleagues are shown, after the convoy reached the suspected crime scene. According to the transcript, “We have arrived at the location where the ambulances were struck. These ambulances are buried in the sand. Here is a UN vehicle, buried in the sand. A bulldozer – a bulldozer of the Israeli Defense Forces – has buried them. We are now searching for the bodies of those who were in these medical and humanitarian vehicles.”
Jonathan Whittall, OCHA’s Gaza and West Bank coordinator, explains on the scene, “Health personnel should never be a target. And yet, we are here today to dig up a mass grave of first responders and medics. Seven days ago, the ambulances of the civil defense and the PRCS arrived at the scene. One after the other, they were struck, their bodies collected and buried in this mass grave. We are digging them up in their uniforms and with gloves on. They were here to save lives. Instead, they landed in a mass grave.