Gaza ambulance ‘crushed’ by IDF.

The bodies of fifteen first responders were discovered in a mass grave in Gaza on Sunday. Sky News looks at what happened in their last moments.

A week prior, the group had vanished while on a rescue mission.

According to the NGO, an ambulance operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society was attacked by Israeli soldiers while on a rescue mission in the early hours of March 23.

Along with a team from the public sector organization Civil Defence, three more ambulances were sent to help them, but communication with the group was quickly lost.

Three days following their disappearance, on March 26, satellite imagery depicts the region. There are evident tire tracks and what appear to be military vehicle-made groundworks.

According to the IDF, the ambulances’ headlights and emergency signals were off, and the troops opened fire on them because they had not synchronized their movements with the military.

However, Mohammed Abu Mosahba, PRCS’s director of ambulance and emergency services, told Sky News that since they weren’t in an evacuation zone, coordination wasn’t necessary.

The attack site is indicated in yellow on the map below. Areas designated as evacuation zones by the IDF in the days before the strike are indicated in red. A fresh evacuation order that was issued the day of the incident and covers the attack site is shown in orange.

About four hours after the crisis started and about an hour after PRCS first made public that it had lost touch with the crew, the IDF’s Arabic spokesman released the evacuation order online at 8:31 a.m. local time that day.

Additionally, Civil Defense’s head of logistics, Dr. Mohammed Al Mughir, claims that until the evacuation order was given—”more than three hours after our colleagues were killed”—coordination was not necessary to move in the area.

He further refutes the IDF’s assertion that the cars’ emergency lights, sirens, and headlights were turned off.

Later, the location of the mass burial was marked by the lights from one of the ambulances that were found lying on top of it.

According to a military weapons expert who spoke to Sky News, at least one of the cars seen in the video has “certainly been crushed”.

The IDF responded that the event was being looked at when Sky News questioned why the cars were crushed and the victims were buried.

Aid workers are seen in UN footage excavating dead bodies from sand heaps and putting them in white bags to be sent to the mortuary.

Attacks on aid workers are growing more frequent

The discovery of the mass grave comes as aid organisations reconsider their position in Gaza amid a rise in attacks in the last few weeks.

At least 29 aid workers were killed or injured in the two weeks to 27 March, the highest rate of casualties in almost a year.

At least 336 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to the NGO Humanitarian Outcomes, which provides data on aid worker security to humanitarian agencies and governments.

The data does not include the deaths of people working for public-sector organisations, such as Civil Defence.

Meriah-Jo Breckenridge, a research analyst at Humanitarian Outcomes, says there has been a “definite uptick” in attacks on aid workers since the ceasefire broke down on 18 March.

On 19 March, a guest house belonging to the UN’s Office for Project Services (UNOPS) was attacked, killing a Bulgarian staff member and injuring six other international workers.

The picture below shows the damage sustained by the building, with a large hole in one wall.

The UN says the building was fired on by an Israeli tank, an allegation that the Israeli government denies.

UNOPS chief Jorge Moreira da Silva said that Israel knew the location of the building and who was working there.

“This was not an accident,” he said.

That attack came just one day after an airstrike on a nearby residential building killed an employee of medical charity Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF).

“It’s impossible for us to be able to operate in such conditions, when we put everybody at risk in an environment where the de-confliction is not working any more,” said MSF head of mission Amanda Bazerolle.

Deconfliction is when aid organisations in Gaza voluntarily tell the IDF their locations to reduce the risk of accidentally being attacked.

Tom Fletcher, under-secretary general for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), says that agencies are not able to work with Israel on protecting their staff as successfully as before.

“It wasn’t always happening in the past, but it certainly isn’t now,” said Mr Fletcher in an interview with Sky News.

Aid locations submitted to IDF

On 24 March, an office belonging to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Rafah was hit.

Footage taken in the immediate aftermath shows plumes of smoke billowing from the side of the building, which has a Red Cross flag clearly displayed on its roof.

The aid group said the structure was damaged by an explosive projectile. No one was killed or injured in the attack.

The IDF admitted responsibility, saying its forces had incorrectly identified a threat. They added that the building’s ownership was “unknown to the force at the time of the shooting”.

“There is basically not a single international aid organisation site, guest house, office or distribution point that has not been submitted with GPS coordinates to the IDF for probably the last year,” says a senior aid worker who recently left Gaza.

“All movements are [deconflicted] and submitted for green lights.”

On 25 March, the UN announced it had taken the “difficult decision” to remove around one third of its international staff from Gaza.

Olga Cherevko, a Gaza-based spokesperson for OCHA, says the decision was partly because of the UN has little aid to distribute, owing to a weeks-long Israeli blockade, but also “the lack of protection from Israeli authorities… in the sense that attacks against humanitarian workers have continued”.

Director of the Palestinian NGOs Network Amjad Shawa criticised the UN’s decision. “It’s not just about aid delivery and distribution – they are our international protection and eye-witnesses,” he said.

“It’s very important for us to keep them here.”

Olive Enokido-Lineham, OSINT producer, contributed reporting.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open-source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.