The New York Times interviewed two people who said they were detained by Israeli soldiers and watched as they opened fire on ambulances and a fire truck, killing 15 people.
It was still dark when a team of ambulances and a fire engine sent by Palestinian emergency services pulled up in Rafah, Gaza's southernmost city, early on March 23. They had been sent to search for fellow paramedics who had left earlier that morning in an ambulance for a rescue mission and then disappeared.
The convoy now stopped next to the missing ambulance, which was parked on the side of the road near U.N. warehouses. When the paramedics got out to look, Israeli soldiers about 50 meters away opened fire on them, according to two men who said they witnessed the shooting.
They said the two men saw what happened because they were being held by the same Israeli soldiers.
One of the two, Munter Abed, 27, a volunteer paramedic, said he was detained after surviving an earlier attack on the missing ambulance that killed two other crew members. The other man, Dr. Saeed al-Bardawil, 55, a physician, said he was detained along with Mr. Abed when he and his son were stopped by Israeli troops on their way to go fishing at about 4.45am.
The New York Times interviewed the two men separately in Gaza days after the United Nations said it had found the bodies of 15 rescue workers — eight from the Palestinian Red Crescent, six from the Gaza Civil Defense and one from the United Nations — in a mass grave. Their ambulances, their fire engine and a UN vehicle that had been crushed were half-buried nearby. The United Nations accused Israel of killing the 15 workers, dumping their bodies and destroying the vehicles.
The accounts of the two men appeared to corroborate these allegations. While their stories could not be independently verified, the details they provided also matched the sequence of events in a video obtained and verified by The New York Times, found on the cellphone of one of the dead paramedics. That video showed an intense barrage of fire pounding the convoy just before dawn.
