Israel lied about its murder of 15 paramedics and rescue workers

Yet the Western media will keep treating Israeli lies about war crimes as credible claims

Israel’s massacre of 15 Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics and rescue workers follows a similar pattern. It goes like this. Israel commits a terrible war crime. The evidence for the crime is overwhelming. The Israeli state issues a pack of lies, which the Western media eagerly laps up. In some cases, the lies are comprehensively debunked, but the rebuttal is either given coverage which is inadequate and lacking in prominence, or simply ignored by many Western media outlets. Rinse and repeat.

Newly released and frankly nightmarish video footage has exposed Israeli claims for what they are - a lie. This will not stop the Western media from continuing to treat Israeli propaganda as credible.

To recap. On 23rd March, Red Crescent medics, first responders and a UN staff member were dispatched in five ambulances, a fire truck and a UN vehicle to collect Palestinians injured by Israeli attacks near Rafah, in the south of Gaza.

The UN reported that all of the vehicles were hit, and that contact was lost. A sole survivor testified that Israel had killed the crew in his ambulance. Access was only granted by the Israeli military five days later. En route, the UN team witnessed and videoed multiple atrocities as hundreds of civilians fled as the Israeli army shot at them, including a woman shot in the back of the head, and a man shot as he tried to retrieve her.

When the UN finally got there, they uncovered a mass grave, reporting that the paramedics and other workers had been killed “one by one” after “driving their clearly marked uniforms". A forensic doctor testified many had been shot at close range. One had his hands and feet tied. The UN also uncovered an attempt by the Israeli military to bury the ambulances and other vehicles.

The evidence was overwhelming. But the IDF issued statements claiming their soldiers had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists”.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the following:

Several uncoordinated vehicles were identified advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals. IDF troops then opened fire at the suspected vehicles.

The Western media was presented, on the one hand, with statements from the United Nations and Red Crescent, evidence from a mass grave, evidence from a forensic doctor, and the testimony of a survivor; and on the other, statements from a military who has committed every war crime under the sun with a long and incontrovertible history of lies.

So what did they do? They treated both as equally credible and plausible versions of events. One BBC journalist reported the following on the news channel:

You have, on the one hand these allegations that Israel has committed an apparent war crime... but the Israeli military has been stressing these were vehicles it says were acting suspiciously and appeared to pose a direct threat to Israeli forces.

This is the classic modus operandi - to turn war crimes into a game of “he says she says”, where we are encouraged to simply conclude that we can never really tell where the truth lies in the “fog of war”, and nothing is ever allowed to definitively stick to Israel.

Such is the sense of impunity of the Israeli military that they did not see fit to make sure they had destroyed all of the possible evidence. Specifically, they failed to seize the mobile phone of one of their victims. The footage of the last moments of these medics and first responders was uncovered and published in the New York Times.

The video is deeply disturbing and requires an emphatic content warning.

The footage shows that, in total contradiction of Israel’s claims, that the ambulances had lights on and were clearly marked. The terrified and obviously unarmed paramedics are then subjected to a barrage of bullets. You hear Ref’at Radwan reciting the Shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith, because he knows he is going to die. His last words were:

"Forgive me, mother. Forgive me. I chose this path to help people. Forgive me, mother."

He was begging for forgiveness from his mother - because had chosen to be a paramedic, as if this is a career which should be treated as a death sentence. His body was then found in the mass grave, with a bullet to his head.

There’s more. Sky News has revealed that the 15 paramedics and first responders were in an area not covered by an evacuation order, discrediting Israel’s claim that coordinated was therefore required.

The Israeli military account is proven to be lies. As Trey Yingst, Chief Foreign Correspondent of Fox News, says:

I’ve spoken with the IDF multiple times about this day and was told “several vehicles were identified advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights, or emergency signals.” That is clearly not true.

So what we have here is an unbelievably grave war crime - the massacre of 15 Red Crescent medics and first responders, which the Israeli military covered up and lied about.

If this had been 15 Israeli medics and first responders butchered by Hamas, the media coverage would be deafening. It would be front page news and lead news bulletins. Every Western leader under the sun would issue damning statements condemning the utter evil of Hamas.

But these victims were Palestinian. On the BBC news website, it’s four stories down - but most damningly, the headline is: “Video footage appears to contradict Israeli account of Gaza medic killings.”

“Appears” to contradict? What does this even mean? The footage definitively proves the Israeli account is a litany of lies. What possible room for doubt exists here?

Just imagine this footage had never been uncovered. Indeed, in the case of so many of Israel’s war crimes, there is no such footage, and Israeli claims are simply allowed to stand.

And what’s even more disturbing is this will not change the Western media’s modus operandi. As I’ve noted, Western media outlets have done rebuttals of Israeli claims before. CNN took apart Israeli claims about the so-called Flour Massacre, when over 100 Palestinians were massacred while waiting for flour. The Washington Post took apart Israel’s claims about the November 2023 assault on al-Shifa hospital. The New York Times examined how, contrary to Israeli claims, 2,000lb bombs were being dropped on so-called ‘safe zones’ by the Israeli military.

The point isn’t just that these rebuttals aren’t frequent enough, or given proper prominence, or treated with the requisite gravity - i.e. as evidence of extreme war crimes. It’s that they are orphaned from the wider narrative. Western media outlets should make clear that Israel has a proven record of entirely false statements about such atrocities. But, like a perverse Groundhog Day, they act as though these rebuttals never happened.

We can see how Western media outlets should behave, by simply looking at how claims by the Russian authorities are treated. Quite correctly, there is no deference there.

This is emblematic of how the Western media has willingly allowed itself to become an integral part of Israel’s propaganda machine.

This is the greatest scandal of Western journalism of our age, and we must keep the receipts for the reckoning ahead.