TEL AVIV:
The head of an Israeli military probe into the killing of 15 Palestinian emergency workers in Gaza acknowledged on Sunday a “mistake” on the part of troops involved in the incident.
The military also confirmed detaining one medic since the incident on March 23.
The Israeli military probe into the killing of 15 Palestinian emergency workers in Gaza on Sunday acknowledged operational failures and said a field commander would be dismissed.
The medics and other rescue workers were killed when responding to a distress call near the southern Gaza city of Rafah in the early hours of March 23, just days after Israel launched a renewed offensive in the Hamas-run territory.
The incident has drawn international condemnation, including concern about possible war crimes from UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk.
Those killed included eight Red Crescent staff members, six from the Gaza civil defence rescue agency and one employee of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, according to the UN humanitarian agency OCHA and Palestinian rescuers.
Their bodies were found about a week later, buried in the sand alongside their crushed vehicles near the site of the shooting in Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan area, in what OCHA described as a mass grave.
Younis Al-Khatib, president of the Palestinian Red Crescent in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has said an autopsy of the victims revealed that “all the martyrs were shot in the upper part of their bodies, with the intent to kill”.
A video recovered from the cellphone of one of the slain aid workers, released by the Red Crescent, shows ambulances travelling with their headlights on and emergency lights flashing.
“The examination identified several professional failures, breaches of orders and a failure to fully report the incident,” Israeli army said.
It added that a deputy commander “will be dismissed from his position due to his responsibilities as the field commander in this incident and for providing an incomplete and inaccurate report during the debrief”.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s civil defence agency reported that Israeli air strikes since dawn on Sunday have killed at least 25 people across the Gaza Strip, including women and children.
Israel resumed its aerial and ground assault on Gaza on March 18, reigniting fighting after a two-month ceasefire that had paused more than 15 months of war in the coastal territory.
“Since dawn today, the occupation’s air strikes have killed 20 people and injured dozens more, including children and women across the Gaza Strip,” Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for the civil defence agency told AFP.
In a separate statement later, the agency reported that five people were killed in an Israeli drone strike on a group of civilians in eastern Rafah.
Since Israel resumed its offensive last month, at least 1,827 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
The overall death toll in the Gaza war has reached 51,201, the majority of them civilians, according to the ministry, figures the UN considers reliable.
