• Nine days ago 15 Palestinian paramedics killed by Israel and buried in a mass grave were found with their hands and legs tied amounting to a serious war crime.
• The UN has said that ambulances and other vehicles were flattened and buried in the sand.
15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers who were killed by Israeli forces nine days ago and buried in a mass grave, were found with their legs and hands tied with gunshot wounds to the head and chest according to two eyewitnesses.
This happened when Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance crews and civil defence rescue workers were sent to the scene of an airstrike in the early hours of the morning in the al-Hashashin district of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city on 23 March.
International humanitarian teams were only allowed access to the site of the incident this weekend with body was recovered on Saturday and fourteen more were found in a sandy grave on Sunday and were brought back for autopsies in the nearby city of Khan Younis.
A senior doctor at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, Dr Ahmed al-Farra witnessed the arrival of some of the remains.
He said: “I was able to see three bodies when they were transferred to the Nasser hospital.
“They had bullets in their chest and head.
“They were executed.
“They had their hands tied.’
“They tied them so they were unable to move and then they killed them.”
Farra also provided the Guardian with photographs he said he had taken of one of the dead on arrival at the hospital.
Another eyewitness who was involved in the recovery of the remains from Rafah on Sunday but did not want to be named also said he saw evidence that the victims were shot after being detained in a phone call with The Guardian.
He said: “I saw the bodies with my own eyes when we found them in the mass grave.”
He said: “They had signs of multiple shots in the chest. One of them had legs tied. One was shot in the head.
“They were executed.”
The Gaza health ministry had said that some of the victims of the attack had been shot after being detained and these eyewitness accounts only add further evidence to that claim.
The victims are believed to have been killed on 23 March by Israeli forces, two of them in the early hours when their ambulance came under Israeli fire while on the way to collect injured people from an earlier airstrike.
The remaining 13 of the dead were in a convoy of ambulances and civil defence vehicles dispatched to retrieve the bodies of their two colleagues who were killed.
One of the dead was a UN employee. A Red Crescent paramedic, named as Assad al-Nassasra, is still missing.
Jen Laerke, a spokesperson for the United Nations aid coordination office said on Tuesday: “This is a huge blow to us … These people were shot.
“Normally we are not at a loss for words and we are spokespeople, but sometimes we have difficulty finding them. This is one of those cases.”
The UN has said that ambulances and other vehicles were flattened and buried in the sand alongside the bodies of the dead by the Israeli military.
The massacre comes after Israel broke the short lived ceasefire agreement it had with Hamas and began a total unprecedented ongoing blockade of the Gaza strip that has lasted 4 weeks.
