The incident took place last Sunday in the Tal Al-Sultan neighborhood in the southern city of Rafah, close to the Egyptian border.
Israeli troops launched an offensive there on March 20, two days after the army resumed aerial bombardments of Gaza following an almost two-month-long truce.
Israeli troops had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists,” the military said in a statement to AFP.
“A few minutes afterward, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops... The troops responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles, eliminating a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.”
The military did not say if there was fire coming from the vehicles.
It added that “after an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles... were ambulances and fire trucks,” and condemned “the repeated use” by “terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes.”
The day after the incident, Gaza’s civil defense agency said in a statement that it had not heard from a team of six rescuers from Tal Al-Sulta who had been urgently dispatched to respond to deaths and injuries.
On Friday, it reported finding the body of the team leader and the rescue vehicles — an ambulance and a firefighting vehicle — and said a vehicle from the Palestine Red Crescent Society was also “reduced to a pile of scrap metal.”
Hamas spokesman Basem Naim accused Israel of carrying out “a deliberate and brutal massacre against Civil Defense and Palestinian Red Crescent teams in the city of Rafah.”
“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,” he said.
Tom Fletcher, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that since March 18, “Israeli airstrikes in densely populated areas have killed hundreds of children and other civilians.”
“Patients killed in their hospital beds. Ambulances shot at. First responders killed,” he said in a statement.
“If the basic principles of humanitarian law still count, the international community must act while it can to uphold them.”
A number of settlers pile out of them and run out of the frame, and the screams of Palestinian women can be heard
Palestinians and rights groups say Israeli forces usually turn a blind eye or intervene on behalf of the settlers
The violence in the village of Jinba follows a settler attack earlier this week in a nearby village in which Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” was left bloodied and bruised before being detained by Israeli soldiers for about 20 hours.
The videos provide uncommonly stark images of the type of settler assault Palestinians in the West Bank say now occurs frequently. They say radical Jewish settlers rarely, if ever, face repercussions for attacking Palestinian communities, while Palestinians are often rounded up in droves and detained by Israeli forces.
AP obtained footage from two security cameras belonging to the Al-Amur family, whose home came under attack. Footage from one camera shows a jeep, an ATV and a white pick-up truck speed up to the edge of the village.
A number of settlers pile out of them and run out of the frame, and the screams of Palestinian women can be heard. The settlers then return into view, and at least 15 of them ascend a slope, getting closer to the camera.
Many are masked, at least three are carrying bats or sticks, and one is armed with an assault rifle. One can be seen throwing a rock, then bending to collect more.
The matriarch of the Al-Amur family, Oula Awad, said she saw the settlers approaching her house between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM, as she was doing laundry outside with her daughter. Her son, Qusai, 17, and husband, Aziz, 63, were washing up to prepare for Ramadan prayers when the settlers pulled up in vehicles and emerged.
“The settler runs toward me and told me, ‘Don’t wave. Do not move forward. We will hit you,’” she said.
In security footage taken from a different camera at the house, she and her daughter, 16-year-old Handa, are seen screaming and waving clothes in the air, calling for help. At one point, Awad makes a motion waving her arms. It is not clear if she throws something at a settler rushing toward her.
The settlers are then seen converging on Qusai. One settler begins hitting him with a stick as he tries to run away. Another settler smashes his head with a rock, sending him to the ground. Four settlers then kick and beat him before running away.
Awad said the settlers locked her and her daughter in a side room as they beat her younger son, Ahmad, and her husband Aziz.
“They entered the room and hit the windows,” said Awad. They tried to burn the furniture. “My husband was standing on the stairs, and they started beating him.”
A video taken by Qusai and shared with the AP showed Ahmad on the ground with a head laceration. Aziz lies nearby, his face bloodied.
Five Palestinians remain in hospitals. Aziz had a chest injury and underwent surgery for skull fractures; Ahmed, 16, is in intensive care. Qusai suffered a broken arm, bruises and cuts. Another villager, Maher Mohammed, had cuts and bruises, as did his son Osama, who was also undergoing kidney examinations.
Nidal Younis, the head of the Masafer Yatta village council, witnessed part of the attack and was detained by police for two hours afterward. He said soldiers who arrived on scene following the attack prevented Palestinians from nearby villages from helping and threw stun grenades at homes, a claim to which the military did not respond.Police and military provide a conflicting account
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