Red Cross outraged over killing of eight medics in Gaza
The nine-person ambulance team came under heavy fire in al-Hashashin on 23 March, said the IFRC. Their bodies were retrieved on Sunday after access was denied for a week. One medic is still missing.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said their staff's bodies were discovered along with those of six members of Gaza's Hamas-run civil defence agency and one UN employee.
They did not say who opened fire on the convoy - but Hamas blamed the Israel Defense Forces for the attack. The BBC has sought comment from the IDF.
In Sunday's statement, the IFRC said the eight bodies of PRCS workers were retrieved "after seven days of silence and having access denied to the area of Rafah where they were last seen".
The organisation identified those killed as ambulance officers Mostafa Khufaga, Saleh Muamer and Ezzedine Shaath, and first responder volunteers Mohammad Bahloul, Mohammed al-Heila, Ashraf Abu Labda, Raed al-Sharif and Rifatt Radwan.
It added that ambulance officer Assad Al-Nassasra was "still missing".
"I am heartbroken. These dedicated ambulance workers were responding to wounded people. They were humanitarians," IFRC Secretary General Jagan Chapagain said.
"They wore emblems that should have protected them; their ambulances were clearly marked.
"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."
The IDF has publicly not commented on the Red Cross and Red Crescent statement.
The AFP news agency reported that on Saturday the Israeli military admitted it had fired on ambulances in southern Gaza last Sunday after identifying them as "suspicious vehicles".
Israeli troops had "opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists", the military said in a statement to AFP.
"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 military added that "after an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles... were ambulances and fire trucks".
It also said there had been "repeated use" by "terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes".
Senior Hamas official Basem Naim condemned the attack.
"The targeted killing of rescue workers - who are protected under international humanitarian law - constitutes a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime," he said.
Israel resumed its military offensive in Gaza on 18 March after the first phase of a ceasefire that began in January came to an end, and negotiations on a second phase of the deal stalled.
More than 900 people have since been killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry has said.
The war was triggered when Hamas attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 back to Gaza as captives.
Israel responded with a massive military offensive, which has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry says.
Wounded Palestinians dying over lack of supplies, US surgeon who worked in Gaza says
Why has Israel bombed Gaza and what next for ceasefire deal?
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Newsweek
an hour ago
- Newsweek
Israel Conducts Deadly Strike Against 'Fake' Aid Workers in Gaza
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) recently conducted a deadly strike targeting what it claimed were armed individuals posing as staff for an international organization dedicated to providing food relief, according to an Israeli military official. The news came as the IDF has sought to push back against a global outcry over the killing of civilian workers in the Gaza Strip, alleging some of them were affiliated with Hamas and other armed factions. Israel has been condemned for its recent killing of an Al Jazeera journalist and his crew, whom the IDF claims were members of Hamas. The Israeli military official told reporters Tuesday that the incident occurred over the weekend after IDF troops identified a gathering of "a few dozen" armed individuals traveling near an IDF post in Gaza. The Israeli forces then observed a parked vehicle bearing the insignia World Central Kitchen (WCK), prompting Israeli personnel to contact the Washington, D.C.-based food security organization to verify that the individuals were not affiliated with the group. The Israeli military official described the situation as one of "armed men in southern Gaza, near an IDF post, posing as humanitarian workers, knowing that the IDF will be much more careful when we see them." "We were able to verify in real time with the WCK that this, in fact, is not related to their organization, and is, in fact, a fake vehicle," the Israeli military official said. "And still, we waited for the people to leave the vehicle." "We were waiting for another identification in real time of the same people to see again that they are still the same people, still armed people," the Israeli military official added. "We waited for them to get out of the car, and then we went forward and eliminated those armed men who were near our troops." A screengrab from an undated video shared by the Israel Defense Forces purports to show armed men posing as World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza. A screengrab from an undated video shared by the Israel Defense Forces purports to show armed men posing as World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza. Israel Defense Forces What We Know The Israeli military official told Newsweek that the IDF was not yet able to determine whether the armed individuals were members of Hamas or any other militant group operating in Gaza. "I'm unable to say they are directly connected to Hamas," the Israeli official said. "We're very careful when we say [there is a] connection, to which organization. We want to be able to verify and have concrete connection when we speak, and be very responsible with the information we put out." The IDF later issued a statement announcing the strike. "In a targeted airstrike last week, five armed terrorists were eliminated while near a vehicle marked with the emblem of the international humanitarian aid organization 'World Central Kitchen' (WCK), despite having no affiliation with the organization, and while posing a threat to our troops," the IDF said. "The terrorists deliberately affixed the emblem and wore yellow vests in an attempt to conceal their activity and avoid being targeted, cynically exploiting the status and trust afforded to aid organizations," the IDF added. What Is World Central Kitchen? World Central Kitchen, founded in 2010 by Spanish American chef and restauranteur José Andrés, operates to provide food relief in areas of crisis around the world, including conflict zones such as Ukraine and Gaza. Late last month, The New York Times published an op-ed by Andrés titled "The World Cannot Stand By With Gaza on the Brink of Famine." In it, he disputed Israel's claims of Hamas looting humanitarian aid convoys and criticized what he called a "blockade" imposed by Israel against food entering Gaza. Days later, World Central Kitchen published an article confirming that it was once again "getting some ingredients and supplies into Gaza we are using to cook for vulnerable families and medical facilities in the community of Deir Al-Balah," near where the deadly incident involving Israeli forces and armed fighters was said to have occurred. World Central Kitchen has yet to issue a statement acknowledging the incident. Newsweek has reached out to World Central Kitchen and the José Andrés Group for comment. Caught in Crossfire News of the incident comes just two days after the IDF announced the killing of a prominent Al Jazeera journalist, Anas Al-Sharif, in strikes targeting Gaza City on Sunday. The IDF claimed that Sharif had covertly operated as part of the "Hamas East Jabaliya Battalion" that was responsible for rocket attacks. Al Jazeera has rejected this claim and a number of international organizations, including the United Nations and the Committee to Protect Journalists have condemned the strike. Israel has previously acknowledged fault in targeting World Central Kitchen staff in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the killing of seven aid workers by Israeli drone fire in April 2024 a "a tragic event in which our forces unintentionally harmed non-combatants in the Gaza Strip." "This happens in war," Netanyahu said at the time. "We are conducting a thorough inquiry and are in contact with the governments. We will do everything to prevent a recurrence." When another Israeli strike killed at least three World Central Kitchen workers in November, the IDF asserted that the target of the operation was a member of Hamas and called on the organization to investigate its employees.
USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Israel ambassador Mike Huckabee says Hamas 'could use some Ozempic'
"Instead of food, they could use some Ozempic," the U.S. ambassador to Israel said of Hamas during an interview with Piers Morgan. Amid mass starvation in Gaza, the U.S. ambassador to Israel said the leaders of Hamas aren't experiencing anything close to the famine-like conditions civilians are enduring. "They don't care about people getting to eat," Ambassador Mike Huckabee told TV host Piers Morgan. "And if you look at the people from Hamas when they get photographed, they're well-fed. None of them are hungry. I guarantee you – look at their faces; look at their bodes. And instead of food, they could use some Ozempic." The comments came as international outrage over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks. The United Nations' World Food Programme has warned that a third of Gaza's population isn't eating for days at a time. (Starvation of a civilian population as a method of war is a crime under international laws.) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to deny that civilians are starving, saying as he announced a new offensive into the Gaza Strip that assessments of the situation have been exaggerated. Read more: One meal a day. $20 for an egg. Choosing which kid gets fed. Starvation stalks Gaza In the interview on Aug. 11, Huckabee defended the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an aid distribution system supported by the U.S. and Israel that has been criticized by other foreign leaders and international organizations for generating violence near distribution sites. Huckabee said Hamas, the Palestinian militant group designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, "hates" the GHF because its aid distribution methods have hurt Hamas' capacity to "control the food market." "Yeah, there's some real deprivation in that country," he said. "But it's not because GHF is killing people."
Vox
an hour ago
- Vox
What Israelis actually think about starvation in Gaza
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. Israeli protesters take part in a demonstration calling for the release of hostages and an end to the war in Gaza, in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Saturday, August 9, 2025. Bloomberg via Getty Images How do Israelis feel about the increasingly horrifying crimes its government is committing in Gaza? This is one of the key questions going forward. Israel is a (teetering) democracy with elections scheduled for next year. The public's attitudes could — by putting pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition — play a major role in determining if, and when, we get a durable ceasefire. And yet, polling presents a somewhat confusing picture of their view on the war. To make sense of this, I called up Dahlia Scheindlin, one of Israel's leading pollsters and author of an excellent recent book on Israeli democracy. Scheindlin told me that Israeli opposition to the war is rooted in self-interest: a belief that continued fighting in Gaza is unnecessarily risking the lives of hostages (about 20 of whom are believed to be alive) and Israeli soldiers. Thus, opposition to the war is deepening while Israelis remain — on the whole — indifferent to the suffering of Gazans. Beyond describing those beliefs, Scheindlin explained where they come from in Israeli society. She got into the deep roots of dehumanization on both sides of the conflict, the conspiracy theory shaping ordinary Israelis' views of starvation in Gaza, and why her time working in post-war Serbia made her more somewhat more optimistic about the chances that there could one day be real peace. A transcript of our conversation follows, edited for length and clarity. I want to start with a poll result that I found horrifying: 79% of Israeli Jews did not feel personally troubled by reports of starvation in Gaza. Do those results seem right to you, based on your broader read of the data? And what does this kind of poll say about the Israeli mindset? Yeah, it absolutely strikes me as correct. There's a general trend [in polls] of a very strong majority of Israeli Jews expressing not only lack of empathy but belligerence and hostility towards Gazans, including civilians. I do think we need to put it in the context of everybody else here. There are parallel trends of deep, deep hostility that we had seen already in joint Israeli-Palestinian survey research done before the war. Very hostile attitudes between the two populations definitely predate October 7. The reason I asked specifically about Israeli Jews — though parallel trends of hostility is obviously hugely important in understanding the situation — is that their views are especially urgent amid the overwhelming evidence that the Israeli government's policy has created a starvation crisis. It is, I think, very difficult for people outside Israel to understand why that doesn't break through in its politics. How is it that, when it seems like your government is committing such a crime, people aren't horrified? Is just dehumanization all the way down — that they think Palestinians deserve it? Or is there denial of what's clearly happening? Is there lack of coverage or censorship in the Israeli media? It's all of those things. Israeli media, as you pointed out, is barely covering civilian suffering in Gaza — which is not much of an excuse to be honest, because all of the information is available. Polls have tested whether Israelis believe the starvation was happening. A recent survey found that 47 percent of all Israelis felt that it was probably lies and made up. Now, if it's 47 percent of the average, it's in the mid-to-upper 50 percent range among Jews — as presumably very few Palestinian citizens of Israel feel that way. So 47 percent said it's not true; it's Hamas' lies. And another 18 percent said, 'Even if it's true, I'm not bothered by it.' Israelis are completely consumed with the hostages. It is front and center; it's everywhere. The country is flooded with hostage symbols: signs, slogans, pins. Everyone wears a pin, including the prime minister. The second thing they're consumed with is the fate of their sons, brothers, husbands, fathers who are serving in Gaza. Basically, the Israeli Jewish public thinks the war needs to stop — but because it's hurting them and not because it's hurting Palestinians. Yes, that is correct. There is a small portion of people who are increasingly troubled by the situation in Gaza — primarily the left, which represents about 20 percent of Israelis. Among the Jewish population, it's about 12 percent to 14 percent. So, it's a minority, but those people are troubled enough that some of them have begun making that a much more central part of their public activity. I'm a little bit skeptical of making it seem like there's sweeping growing trends [towards public outcry about Gazan suffering]. There are demonstrations of people holding posters of children who've been killed in Gaza and also of people going to Air Force bases in Israel to hold those posters and say, 'Don't go.' There were two people who burst into a reality TV show — you know, primetime television — a couple days ago and screamed, 'Stop the war.' Is it growing? I don't know. But it's certainly becoming more urgent, and they're making the claim more publicly, and I think they feel that there's some space to make that claim more publicly. I think what you hear among a lot of mainstream Israelis — which includes people from the center and even the moderate right — is that, of course, the war is bad for everybody — get our hostages back, our sons back — and it's also bad for Gazans. But [the Gazans] certainly are not a priority. Many Israelis simply say, 'I cannot be sad for the civilians of Gaza,' after what they saw on October 7 and during hostage releases. They were often released with these really grotesque ceremonies and forced to cheer and [surrounded by] mobs. On one of those days when a hostage was released, I had a friend write to me saying, 'You still think there are innocent people in Gaza?' because of the mob. Now, even if there are thousands of people [jeering at hostages], that's out of 2 million. And, of course, we had thousands of people on the Israeli side who support, you know, terrible things. But [the imagery] is part of what explains the very dehumanizing attitudes that don't allow for compassion. Is this psychology part of what allows many Israelis to dismiss the seriousness or significance of the international outrage about Gaza? They would say that the Europeans or whoever simply don't get it; they haven't been through what we've been through, and they don't understand what it's like here. Or, even more aggressively, that they're either being taken in by Hamas propaganda or are themselves antisemitic. What [Israelis] are saying now is 'Everybody forgot about October 7.' They forgot who really started it — because, for a lot of Israelis, everything was sort of manageable before that. I think that the world hasn't forgotten October 7. They just don't think it's an excuse for what Israel is doing anymore. Right. It's [also] an extremely widespread view here that the entire global media is against Israel because the world — [including] the UN and the international system — is always critical of Israel. And the government is compulsively pushing the line that the rest of the world is just being spoon-fed lies directly by Hamas. In their defense, there's a grain of truth to that, right? Hamas will lie about things all the time; they're a horrifying organization. I know, but the assumption is that there's nobody else getting information out — that there's no Palestinian journalists who are doing their work, that there's no social media, that the international organizations who are there are never getting new information — it's only Hamas, and that international media isn't making any effort to get information from any source other than Hamas, which is just fundamentally factually not true. International media is getting its information from their own stringers and reporters inside Gaza, from credible vetted social media, or international organizations. If you think that the whole thing is made up, you're looking at a vast conspiracy of collusion between Hamas, observers on the ground, average Palestinians — a huge conspiracy of all of them. It seems to me that there's a real opportunity here for a politician or political faction in Israel to turn the things that Israelis are mad about — the hostages, soldier casualties — into an indictment of the broader right-wing worldview that is inflicting harm on Palestinians and taking their land is good for Israeli security — to argue that the government's whole theory of the case is a failure, and that a new approach is needed. And yet, I just have not seen a very successful articulation of an alternative philosophy — one that has caught fire and become really powerful in Israeli politics — since October 7. The public opinion groundwork is there, but politicians aren't taking advantage of it. You're absolutely right; politicians aren't taking advantage of it. Nobody's really making a case for an alternative. The opposition [parties are] maddeningly focused on criticizing; all of the critical points that you and I have just raised are out there. But nobody connects the dots and says, 'Here is an alternative. Here's what we would do differently.' Everybody limits themselves saying, for example, what we would do differently on a hostage deal. It's never about the bigger vision: How do you envision Israel ending this war and preventing the next war? I can tell you, from politicians' perspective, it's because they know that, on a deeper level, Israelis are right wing. [About] 60 percent of Jewish Israelis self-identify as right wing. They don't want a Palestinian state, and they don't want to hear about a negotiated solution, and they don't want to hear about concessions. So, that's why the opposition politicians don't want to get into it, because they have forgotten that leadership means courage — that leadership means leading, not following. They're basically just cowards running after a very simplistic reading of public opinion. Even scratching one level below the surface, they would know that you can change public opinion over time. We've seen repeatedly, over a decade, that the public changes its mind slowly and incrementally, but significantly, on issues related to conflict resolution or negotiations, concessions, final status — especially when they see it as a realistic possibility, and especially when their leadership is behind it and makes the case. I know from personal experience doing public opinion polling for Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the Camp David negotiations [the US-led peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians] in the year 2000. I was literally conducting the research, watching the focus groups, looking at the data through every night or almost every night of that negotiation, and people were changing their minds — slowly, but very steadily considering how compressed it was — over extremely controversial things. Did they love it? No, but they were moving. When we try to tell people in polls, 'Here are the advantages [of peace],' they can change their minds a little bit — but it's so remote from their experience, so hypothetical. There's no anchor in reality. If politicians were getting behind this, they would be able to create that kind of momentum. That's a bit grim, right? I thought my previous analysis was extremely optimistic. What I'm saying is that public opinion can change. The conditions are that there are some realistic policy grounds for a change in the situation and legitimate leaders who are advocating for it. And those two things are not impossible. Well, they're just not there now, though. That's why I said it's grim. Right now, sure. However, we have elections coming up; we're heading into an election year in 2026. [It's] very unlikely before then, but possibly. And all polls are showing opportunity is there, and the Netanyahu government has not been able to win a majority in any credible survey. It could still happen that Netanyahu wins again, but it's also possible that a different government might have a little bit less acumen at spinning the world around their finger — and even start feeling some pressure from the world to move towards two states. So, then, let me ask one long-term question. There's a line from the writer Omar El Akkad that I can't really get out of my head. I'm sure you've heard it. 'One day, everyone will have always been against this.' Exactly. Do you think that's true when it comes to Israel? That one day, Israelis who supported the war will say, 'I never could have supported that'? I think that this collective sense of regret — the rewriting of history whereby everybody was against it — is probably the exception more than the rule. I worked in various countries in the Balkans from roughly 2006 to 2010. What I saw there is that every side thought that they got the short end of the deal. Every side thought that the world was against them. Every side was embittered. But particularly the Serbian side, which I know better and was also viewed as the aggressor. I pretty much never encountered anybody who thought that they did the wrong thing other than losing. I'll never forget the taxi driver who said, 'You know, we lost Bosnia, we lost Kosovo, we lost everything.' And that — [not the genocide] — was his major regret. Yet, peace between Serbia and both Bosnia and Kosovo seems to be holding. That's part of another developing hypothesis I have — which I haven't proved — but maybe somebody's investigated. I think there is a habitation factor to both violence and non-violence. The longer you experience non-violence, the harder it becomes to break it — even if you kind of still hate each other. So, no, I'm not waiting for Israelis and Palestinians to love each other. We don't have the luxury of waiting for that.
