GAZA CITY, Palestine

The Gaza media office said on Saturday that the Israeli military carried out a "brutal and unprecedented" execution of medical and civil defense teams in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on March 23.

The statement came as a response to a viral video released on Saturday, which was found on the phone of a Palestinian paramedic whose body was discovered in a mass grave alongside 14 colleagues after they were executed by the Israeli army while performing their humanitarian duties.

The media office condemned the incident, calling it "another crime added to the occupation's black record."

It emphasized that the footage "completely disproves the Israeli occupation's false and misleading narrative" that the vehicles approached “suspiciously” without clear signals, saying the footage “exposed the lies of the Israeli military.”

This crime is a "flagrant violation of all international conventions," and it held the international community responsible for its silence, it added.

The office called for an "independent international investigation" into the execution of the medical and civil defense teams, as well as for truth-finding missions to visit the targeted sites and mass graves where Israel “concealed the horrors of its ongoing genocide.”

It urged for the immediate protection of humanitarian teams operating in Gaza.

On March 31, the Israeli army claimed that the attack on the ambulances was not random, alleging that nine members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups were killed in the attack.

However, on March 30, the Palestine Red Crescent Society announced the discovery of 15 bodies following the Israeli attack.

According to Gaza’s Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal, several members of the civil defense team were found with their hands and feet bound and visible bullet wounds on their heads and torsos, suggesting they were executed at close range after being identified for their humanitarian work. One of the civil defense personnel had been decapitated, and the remaining bodies were found in pieces.

More than 50,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed in Gaza in Israel's military onslaught since October 2023.