New evidence appears to disprove the given by the Israel Defence Force for why its soldiers killed 15 Palestinian paramedics and civil defense workers in in late March.
The Israeli military said at the time that its forces had opened fire on several vehicles after they suspiciously approached troops without coordination or headlights.
According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), paramedics and civil defense workers were attacked by soldiers in Rafah on March 23. The bodies were only recovered from a mass grave seven days later.
The PRCS has now published a video that it says is from the cell phone of one of the paramedics who was killed.
Filmed through the windshield of a vehicle, two ambulances and a fire engine with signal lights on their roofs can be clearly seen driving in a convoy along a country road. The footage was taken in the dark, making the signal lights clearly visible. After a short time, they stopped near a minibus that was standing unlit next to the road on unpaved ground.
Suddenly, you see that the windshield has several cracks. Two men — one of them in a high-visibility vest — run from one of the ambulances already stationary to the broken-down vehicle. A frightened male voice is heard speaking in Arabic, and then the person filming seems to duck down while shots ring out. The image goes largely black.
The voice continues to speak in an anxious, pleading tone. It is possible to hear, among other things, prayers that Muslims say when they think they are close to death. The volley of gunfire continues for several minutes. Then the video ends.
Israeli army wants to investigate video
According to the PRCS, it sent a copy of the footage to the UN Security Council. A UN diplomat leaked the footage to The New York Times, which was the first outlet to post it.
An editor for the newspaper wrote on X: “We received video footage showing Israel attacking the convoy of aid workers in Gaza with a hail of bullets and a paramedic desperately saying his dying prayers. The ambulances had lights and were marked, disproving Israel’s claim.”
In the meantime, video sequences have been published in various lengths by many media outlets such as DW, The Guardian and the BBC and their social media channels. The resolution is not good in any of the versions.
If the March 23 bloodbath described by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society is any indication, it is clear that the vehicles were — contrary to the account of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — illuminated, they were easily recognizable as ambulances and at least one of the people was a paramedic.
While the IDF leadership has announced in a statement that it will “thoroughly” examine “all allegations, including the documents circulating about the incident,” claims are making the rounds on the internet that the people were not paramedics but terrorists in disguise. A still image from the video is used as the alleged proof.
Claim: An X user posted a very blurred still image from the video, which is supposed to show one of the alleged paramedics. In front of him, a long dark spot on his left hand is circled in red. The user writes: “The video clearly shows armed terrorists in these ambulances.” The origin of the image could be a post on X that has been viewed more than 300,000 times and is accompanied by a similar comment: “Interesting. I didn’t know the Red Cross issued AK-47s as standard medical equipment,” it reads.
: False
If you look at the sequence from which the image was taken, you will quickly notice that the person shown is not carrying a weapon. Both hands are swinging back and forth in a natural movement. If this person is holding anything at all, it is so small that it cannot be seen on the video. The dark spot turns out to be the shadow that the person casts in the headlights of the vehicle from which they are filming.
This is also what some user comments write under the X posts.
Do reactions confirm anti-Palestinian prejudices?
In a later comment on his post, the account owner who allegedly made the false claim writes that he did not mean the theory seriously. He implies that his post was a satirical jab at pro-Israeli voices who blame for all the injustice happening in Gaza. And concludes that he has exposed the prejudices of these people: “Confirmation bias confirmed.”
It is presumably precisely this psychological phenomenon that leads internet users to recognize an assault rifle in the picture: Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive distortion in which the brain unconsciously perceives information selectively. Confirmation is then given primarily for what is expected or desired in advance (bias).
Confirmation bias occurs when someone — without being aware of it — actively or passively searches for information that confirms their own prejudice or thesis. The US-Israeli psychologist and Nobel Prize winner David Kahnemann was even of the opinion that confirmation bias can act like optical illusions.
Hauwau Mohammed and Rachel Baig contributed to this report
The post Fact check: Paramedics killed in Gaza were not armed appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
