Why isn't this front page news?

If this crime had been committed by Hamas, the global outrage would have been deafening

There is no crime that Israel can commit in full view of the world that it can’t get away with. No crime too grotesque, no crime too depraved, no crime too sadistic.

Here is a brutal lesson that we have been forced to relearn over and over and over and over again.

Just over a week ago, as Israel launched its latest onslaught against Rafah, 10 members of the Palestine Red Crescent were dispatched to collect those injured by the Israeli military, so they could receive medical assistance. They were accompanied by 6 Civil Defense first responders.

What happened next? As the United Nations’ Jonathan Whittall put it:

All five ambulances and one fire-truck were struck, along with a UN vehicle that arrived later. Contact was lost with all

He goes on to say:

One survivor said Israeli forces had killed both of the crew in his ambulance. For days, OCHA - [the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] coordinated to reach the site but our access was only granted 5days later.

On the way there, the OCHA team saw horrors which they videoed, which you can see for yourself (with an obvious content warning). Whittall reported encountering hundreds of civilians fleeing as the Israeli army shot at them. They watched as a woman was shot in the back of the head, and when a young man sought to retrieve her, he was then shot too.

He goes on:

Returning the next day, we were finally able to reach the site and discovered a devastating scene: ambulances, the UN vehicle, and fire truck had been crushed and partially buried. After hours of digging, we recovered one body - a Civil Defense worker beneath his fire truck.

Just to be clear here - the Israeli army even sought to bury the ambulances, fire truck and UN vehicle after massacring the medical staff and civil workers.

Yesterday, on the first day of Eid, the term returned. They recovered the bodies of 8 Red Crescent medical staff, 6 Civil Defence and 1 UN staff. Whithall says:

They were killed in their uniforms. Driving their clearly marked vehicles. Wearing their gloves. On their way to save lives. This should never have happened

In a further videoed statement, Whithall added that the paramedics and other workers had been killed “one by one” and then “their bodies were gathered and buried in this mass grave.”

Now the Israeli army, who are as pathologically addicted to lying and gaslighting as they are to extermination, claimed on Saturday that Israeli troops had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists”.

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 IDF added that “after an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles … were ambulances and fire trucks”, and condemned what it claimed was “the repeated use” by “terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes”.

Now we know that the Israeli have lied and lied and lied again about their atrocities, relying on the fact that Western media outlets treat the Israeli authorities as credible, respectable sources, and that while the truth about many of Israeli atrocities is later established, the world’s attention has generally speaking moved on by then.

(Examples which belatedly appeared in mainstream outlets who overall have deferred to Israeli claims include the Flour Massacre, the November 2023 raid on al-Shifa hospital and the use of 2,000lb bombs in so-called safe zones, not that any of these shifted the overall narrative).

What we do know is that - according to the testimony of one surviving member of the rescue team - these medical staff and civil defense personnel were handcuffed and then executed before being buried in the sand.

So according to this evidence, medical workers in ambulances, with civil defense first responded and a UN member of staff were surrounded by the Israeli army, in some cases handcuffed, executed, and then buried in a mass grave.

The names of the ambulance crew members and their photographs have been released, I’m going to read out their names, let’s remember them:

The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) Societies have issued a statement in which they say they are outraged at these deaths, noting that their staff disappeared when they came under heavy fire in Al-Hashashin on 23rd March, with 7 days of silence and access being denied to the area of Rafah where they were last seen.

The Secretary General of the IFRC said the following:

I am heartbroken. These dedicated ambulance workers were responding to wounded people. They were humanitarians

They wore emblems that should have protected them; their ambulances were clearly marked. They should have returned to their families; they did not.

Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of International Humanitarian Law could not be clearer – civilians must be protected; humanitarians must be protected. Health services must be protected.

And yet media outlets continue to strip away accountability from the Israeli state. In classic BBC style, the original headline about this story was: “Red Cross outraged over killing of eight medics in Gaza.”

After widespread outrage online this was changed to: “Red Cross outraged over killing of medics by Israeli forces in Gaza”. This underlines that public pressure works. As Karishma Patel - a BBC presenter who resigned over Palestine coverage said:

It’s always worth pointing these evidence-averse headlines out to @BBCNews. It was just updated to include key information: that Israeli forces were responsible. This is now the clearest and most editorially brave BBC headline I’ve seen on Gaza.

However, the story did not even make the BBC news online front page.

Massacring medical workers and burying them in a mass grave. You would once have imagined that there would be a consensus that this sort of crime was an obscenity. I hardly need tell you how the Western media would cover Israeli ambulances being attacked by Hamas militants, who then mass execute the medical staff and civil workers and dump their bodies in a mass grave. It would dominate every newspaper front page, every news bulletin, and be offered up as evidence of the utter depravity and evil of Hamas.

But the victims here are Palestinians, and their lives are judged to have little or no meaning, and the perpetrator is the Israeli state, and they are our allies, they are judged to be “us”, the civilised West. The civilised West which butchers ambulance workers and then tosses their bodies into a mass grave.

This is not an exception: far from it. Who can forget 5 year old Hind Rajab and her desperate, terrified phone call to the Palestine Red Crescent after an ISraeli tank, just metres away, in broad daylight, had repeatedly fired on the vehicle she was in, slaughtering four of her cousins as well as her aunt and uncle. Two paramedics were sent in an ambulance to rescue her, its movements coordinated with the Israeli so-called Defense Forces. The IDF then blew that ambulance up. Several days later, the decomposing bodies of Hind and her family were found, but very little remained of the incinerated paramedics.

According to the United Nations, at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in the 18 months of genocide in Gaza. They have been shot, they have been burned alive, they have been shredded by bombs and shells, they have been tortured and indeed raped to death, as was the reported fate of Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, the former head of orthopaedics at al-Shifa hospital.

According to a United Nations inquiry found last October:

Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.

Who can forget, too, the slaughter of the World Central Kitchen aid workers last April - a rare example of an atrocity which got massive media attention because the victims, other than the Palestinian driver, were all Westerners. When you look at all the evidence there you would find it frankly impossible to imagine how the Israeli army could have killed them accidentally. The consequence then, of course, was that multiple aid agencies suspended their operations in Gaza, which I’m sure the Israeli authorities were devastated about, bearing in mind they have sought to deliberately starve the Palestinian people.

After this latest massacre, of course, medical agencies will judge it to be more dangerous to take part in rescue missions. This will mean more of the Palestinians who are injured by the Israeli military will die, thus helping to facilitate Israel’s genocide.

This one atrocity - if committed by a state or force hostile to the West - would have triggered global horror and revulsion. Yet Israel has committed countless other atrocities with this description - and nor did they receive this sort of coverage either. This normalisation of depravity will come at a vast cost.