Since last week, nine Red Crescent crew members have been missing after they came under Israeli fire in Rafah.
The president of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has condemned Israel for targeting its paramedics as they “fulfil their humanitarian mission”.
During a news conference in Ramallah, occupied West Bank on Sunday, Younis al-Khatib said the search to find nine missing team members in Gaza is ongoing.
The PRCS lost contact with a crew on March 23, after they came under heavy Israeli fire in Rafah, in southern Gaza.
“Those souls are not mere numbers. If this incident [happened] anywhere else, the whole world would have moved heaven and earth to expose this war crime,” al-Khatib said.
He added that, two days ago, a rescue team was able to reach the scene where the crew members went missing with the help of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and was able to retrieve the body of a crew member, which had been buried.
However, rescue teams were unable to investigate whether the remaining crew members were alive.
“There are a number of scenarios for what happened… After more than one week of losing communication with our crew – either they have been killed or detained by the Israeli occupation forces,” al-Khatib said.
‘Suspicious vehicles’
Last week, the Israeli military told the AFP news agency that it had fired on ambulances and fire trucks – calling them “suspicious vehicles” – that arrived at a scene where it was carrying out attacks.
Hamas political bureau member Basem Naim slammed the attack on the ambulance and said the “targeted killing of rescue workers – who are protected under international humanitarian law – constitutes a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime”.
OCHA chief Tom Fletcher said since Israel broke the ceasefire in Gaza on March 18 and resumed its war on the enclave, Israeli air attacks have hit “densely populated areas”, with “patients killed in their hospital beds, ambulances shot at, first responders killed”.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health announced on Saturday that since Israel resumed its attacks, at least 921 people have been killed in the territory, adding to the more than 50,000 killed since October 7, 2023.
Israel launched its war after the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, during which 1,139 people died and about 250 were taken captive into Gaza.