Israel blames ‘failures’ for killing of medics

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What happened

Israel’s military said Sunday that its investigation into the killing of 15 aid workers in Gaza had uncovered “several professional failures, breaches of orders and a failure to fully report the incident.” The Israel Defense Forces field commander in charge of the March 23 killings was dismissed, Israel said, and a brigade commander reprimanded.

Who said what

The IDF special forces unit killed eight Palestinian Red Crescent personnel, six emergency rescue workers and a United Nations employee in three separate predawn attacks at the same location south of Rafah, then buried the 15 aid workers in a mass grave along with their crushed emergency vehicles. Firing on the first medical team and then the ambulance crews that came to find them an hour later “resulted from an operational misunderstanding by the troops,” the report said, while killing the U.N. worker was “a breach of orders.”

The shootings “outraged many in the international community,” with some calling them a “war crime,” The Associated Press said. Israel “backtracked” from its initial claim, that the ambulances were “advancing suspiciously” toward the IDF troops “without headlights or emergency signals” after cellphone video recovered from one of the medics showed the ambulances with “lights flashing and logos visible.” Breaking the Silence, an organization of IDF veterans, called the report “riddled with contradictions, vague phrasing and selective details.”

What next?

Israel’s military advocate general was investigating the incident and could pursue criminal charges, but “there are no outside investigations of the killings underway,” the AP said. The IDF has “killed more than 150 emergency responders” and “well over 1,000 health workers,” according to the U.N., and it “rarely investigates such incidents.”