Israel’s Military Cites ‘Professional Failures’ in Killings of Gaza Medics

In a statement and a briefing summarizing its investigation into the deadly episode, the military said a deputy commander would be dismissed.

The Israeli military said Sunday that an investigation into its soldiers’ deadly attack on medics in southern Gaza last month had identified “several professional failures” and that a commander would be dismissed.

The military had previously acknowledged carrying out the attack in Rafah that killed 14 rescue workers and a United Nations employee who drove by after the others were shot. But it offered shifting explanations for why its troops fired on the emergency vehicles and said it was investigating the episode, one that prompted international condemnation and that experts described as a war crime.

On Sunday — nearly a month after the attack — the military released a statement summarizing its findings.

“The examination identified several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident,” it said.

The shootings of the rescue workers, the military said, resulted from “an operational misunderstanding” by troops on the ground “who believed they faced a tangible threat from enemy forces.” The firing on the U.N. vehicle, the statement said, constituted “a breach of orders” in a combat setting.

In a more detailed briefing for reporters shortly after the statement was released, the head of the investigating team, Yoav Har-Even, a major general in the reserves, described the killings as “a tragic and undesired result of a complex operational situation,” compounded by some serious errors in the actions of the forces on the ground.

The inquiry was carried out by a body known as the General Staff Fact Finding Mechanism, which is made up of professionals outside the regular operational chain of command. General Har-Even said it involved a reconstruction of the episode using the same night-vision equipment used by the forces at the time.

The chief military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, said the military “regrets the harm caused to uninvolved civilians.” But he also blamed Hamas, saying it creates a “problematic gray zone” by routinely exploiting civilian infrastructure. He said it used ambulances to transport fighters and weapons.

The Israeli troops involved in the episode fired on ambulances and on a fire truck sent by the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the Civil Defense, as well as the United Nations vehicle that passed by separately, according to witness accounts, video and audio of the attack.

Two weeks ago, the Israeli military acknowledged that some of its early assertions about what had happened, based on accounts from troops involved in the killing, were partly mistaken.

Military officials had initially asserted, repeatedly and erroneously, that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” toward the troops “without headlights or emergency signals.”

The military backtracked on that assertion a day after The New York Times published a video, discovered on the cellphone of one of the dead paramedics, that showed the clearly marked vehicles flashing their lights and coming to a halt before the attack.

At the briefing on Sunday, the military displayed 10 minutes of blurry aerial footage from a thermal surveillance camera showing the convoy of vehicles approaching the area where about 20 soldiers were lying in ambush about 30 meters from the road. The emergency lights could not be clearly seen in the aerial footage.

The military said that “due to poor night visibility,” the deputy battalion commander, who was the most senior officer on the ground and the first to open fire on the convoy, “did not initially recognize the vehicles as ambulances.”

General Har-Even said the commander was wearing night vision goggles and asserted that his line of sight was obstructed in a way that obscured the emergency lights of the fire truck in front of him.

The investigation, the Israelis say, found a chain of blunders beginning when soldiers first fired on an ambulance they had mistaken for a Hamas police vehicle, killing two of the passengers and detaining a third.

An initial interrogation of the detainee in the field somehow reinforced the troops’ conviction that they had attacked a Hamas target, General Har-Even said, without elaborating. But following additional questioning hours later — after the other ambulances, the fire truck and the U.N. vehicle had been fired on — it became apparentthat the individual was not affiliated with Hamas.

About an hour after the initial attack, the convoy came to look for the missing crew of the first ambulance. When the vehicles stopped and people began exiting them, General Har-Even said, the soldiers assumed that they too were Hamas operatives who had come to help their colleagues. The forces believed their position had been compromised, the general said, and feeling threatened, they opened fire.

Yet the military’s own aerial surveillance footage showed that the passengers began exiting the rescue vehicles on the other side of the road and were moving away from the Israeli forces, not toward them.

Israeli soldiers later buried most of the bodies in a mass grave, crushed the ambulances, the fire truck and the U.N. vehicle, and buried those as well.

The Israeli military said in its statement that “removing the bodies was reasonable under the circumstances, but the decision to crush the vehicles was wrong.”

The commander of the brigade involved will receive a reprimand “for his overall responsibility for the incident,” it said, while the battalion’s deputy commander will be dismissed because of his responsibilities as the field commander at the time “and for providing an incomplete and inaccurate report during the debrief.”

The Israeli military’s first account also said that nine of those killed had been operatives for Hamas or another militant group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It later revised that count, saying that six of them were Hamas operatives, without providing evidence. The military acknowledged on Sunday that none of the 15 dead aid workers had been armed.

Jonathan Whittall, a U.N. official currently in Gaza who helped retrieve the bodies of the rescue workers, suggested that the Israeli investigation did not go far enough. “Without accountability,” he said in a statement after the findings were released, “we risk continuing to watch atrocities unfolding, and the norms designed to protect us all, eroding.”

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.