After footage surfaced contradicting its version of events, the Israeli military now admits it killed 15 unarmed aid workers—but then cleared itself of wrongdoing. An internal probe by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism (FFAM) found “no violations” of its code of ethics, only “professional errors” and failures in protocol.
The victims included medics from within the UN, the Red Crescent, and Palestinian Civil Defense. They were gunned down near Khan Younis, Gaza on March 23.
A deputy commander was dismissed, not for the killings, but for filing a “partial and inaccurate” report. Another officer was formally censured for “mismanagement” of the scene afterwards: crushing the ambulances and burying them with the medics’ bodies under the sand, and not showing the UN the location for a week.
The IDF’s official explanation? Soldiers mistook a marked ambulance for a police car and its occupants for terrorists. “Because the soldiers thought they had encountered Hamas operatives initially, the probe said that the troops were ‘readying for the possibility’ of additional enemy forces,” reports the Times of Israel. Then, two hours later, they shot up more emergency vehicles—a firetruck and a clearly marked UN pickup. One soldier claimed he couldn’t see the vehicles’ flashing lights.
The incident would likely have disappeared, like so many others, had a victim’s cell phone recording not been recovered a few days later. That evidence forced the IDF to revise its narrative.
The killings, the report concludes, were “regrettable” but not unethical—because the troops “felt they were in danger.” Put aside the 35,000 or so women and children, who are called collateral damage. These 17 paramedics and aid workers, as adult males, exactly fit what Israel has been counting as terrorists-until-proven-otherwise.
