Palestinians inspect the damage at an ambulance repair yard that was hit by Israeli strikes in the central Gaza Strip on March 24, 2025. AFP
The attack took place last Sunday in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in the southern city of Rafah, near the Egyptian border. Israeli troops launched a ground assault in the area on March 20, two days after resuming their genocidal war on Gaza, breaking a nearly two-month-long truce.
Initially, Israel claimed it had "opened fire toward Hamas vehicles" and killed several fighters. However, it later acknowledged that the suspicious vehicles were ambulances and fire trucks.
Israel frequently targets civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, ambulances, media workers and aid staff, falsely alleging ties to Hamas without evidence.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said that the Israeli occupation forces continue to refuse to allow competent authorities to search for their missing crews in Rafah.
The PRCS said, on Saturday, that the fate of seven of its ambulance crews remains unknown for nine consecutive days, WAFA news agency reported.
It explained that the occupation forces refused to allow a rescue team to enter the Tel Sultan area to search for the missing crews.
The day after the incident, Gaza's civil defence agency said in a statement that it had not heard from a team of six rescuers 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".
Basem Naim, a member of Hamas's political bureau, 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."
*This story was edited by Ahram Online.
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