They Had Their Lights On

The Rafah Paramedic Massacre and the Collapse of Credibility

Photos of the scene of the massacre.

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“Suspicious vehicles.” “No emergency lights.” “Uncoordinated approach.”
That was the official line. Spouted by the Israeli occupation regime, parroted by BBC, and shamefully repeated at the UN by the U.S. delegate. A seamless propaganda circuit, laundering a war crime into administrative language.

The “Israeli” statement on the massacre they committed.

But now we know: it was all a lie.

A video recovered from the phone of a murdered Palestinian medic shows clearly marked ambulances and fire trucks with their emergency lights flashing—moments before Israeli forces opened fire. The vehicles were not unmarked. They were not stealthily approaching. They were executing a UN-backed mission to retrieve the wounded.

They were following protocol.
And they were targeted anyway.

The Palestinian paramedic Ref’at Radwan whose voice appeared in the video before being executed by the Israeli occupation forces along with 14 others during a humanitarian mission in Rafah.

He says: "Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose... to help people"

He was found inside a mass grave with a bullet in his head.

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This Was Not Crossfire. It Was Execution.

On March 23, 2025, fifteen Palestinian emergency responders—including medics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Civil Defense crews, and a UN staffer—were ambushed while attempting a rescue in Rafah. Their bodies were found in a mass grave, some handcuffed, their medical gloves and supplies scattered in the sand.

Their ambulances were bombed.
Their uniforms did not protect them.
Their lights did not matter.
They were executed.

This is iatrocide—the targeted annihilation of medical infrastructure and personnel as a genocidal tactic.

As I wrote in Iatrocide: The Weaponization of Medicine as a Strategy of Genocidal Erasure:

“To bomb a hospital is not just to kill. It is to declare that certain lives are not worth saving—and never will be.”

This was not chaos.
Not collateral.
Not the fog of war.

It was policy.

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The Lie Collapses in Real Time

The Israeli occupation regime claimed the vehicles approached “suspiciously without lights.” That lie was echoed in a disgraceful U.S. statement at the UN, where American delegates parroted the language of “unauthorized vehicles” and “threat perception.”

But now, that story is shredded.

The New York Times, after verifying footage obtained from a senior UN diplomat, confirmed the truth:
The vehicles had their lights on.
They were clearly marked.
They were conducting an authorized rescue.

Israel later admitted to firing on the convoy—but with the casual cruelty of impunity, issuing no apology, no correction, no accountability.

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What the Footage Proves

• Lights were on.

• Vehicles were labeled.

• Emergency responders were in uniform.

• Bodies were found handcuffed.

• This was an execution—not an engagement.

This matches the pattern documented in Massacre by Design​ and by Poole et al.’s 2025 spatial analysis:
Trauma centers, ambulance corridors, and medics are being systemically targeted.

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U.S. Complicity is No Longer Even Subtle

The United States didn’t just repeat Israeli lies—they helped construct the cover story. At the UN Security Council, the U.S. ran diplomatic interference. They deflected attention. They blamed Hamas. They erased the massacre.

Let’s be clear:
This is not neutrality. It is alliance.
This is not oversight. It is orchestration.

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This Is Iatrocide

What happened in Rafah is part of a broader genocidal strategy—to make healing impossible, to criminalize care, to punish those who save lives. Gaza is being transformed into a zone where ambulances are war targets, medics are enemies, and survival itself is framed as resistance.

First responders should never be targets.
Their murder is a red line.
But in Gaza, every red line has been crossed—
burned, buried, and mocked.

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This Was Never a Tragedy. It Was a Doctrine.

This is genocide.
This is iatrocide.
This is medical extermination.

And it’s happening in Gaza, on our watch, in the open.

The medics had their lights on.
They followed the “rules.”
And they were still executed.

So we stop retreating.
We stop euphemizing.
We name the crime.

And we demand justice.
For every slaughtered Palestinian, young to old.
For every bombed ambulance, hospital, mosque, school, tent, etc.
For every life that could’ve been saved—
if the world had the courage to act.

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Euro-Med Report:

Published April 1, 2025 Read report in full here on Euro-Med

The bodies had distinct features, but they were in the early stages of decomposition. When they were examined, it was evident that a barrage of bullets had struck them. Based on my observations, the injuries were located in the chest region. A closer look revealed that some of the victims had still been alive despite their injuries—they were apparently buried alive with their feet bound.

“Among the bodies we looked at was Ibrahim al-Maghari’s. His body was covered in severe bruises and showed evidence of torture, and his legs seemed bound. After being shot in the back of the head, his face was completely ripped apart. Regarding Fouad al-Jamal’s body, he was shot in the head from a very close distance, causing his skull to shatter,[giving the appearance of] crushed bones. We discovered that every employee of the Palestinian Red Crescent had been shot in the left and right sides of the head.

After getting permission from the Israeli army, we removed the bodies with immense grief and suffering, moved them to ambulances, and left the site for the hospital.”

Ahmed went on, “We saw bags, blankets, clothing, and other items belonging to thousands of citizens who had been displaced that day, when we first arrived at the scene of the incident and collected the body of Anwar al-Attar. However, these items were absent when we returned to the site a few days later, indicating that the incident site had been altered and tampered with."

He affirmed: “We were joined by a Red Cross delegation and a forensic physician with expertise in autopsies when the bodies were recovered. Along with documentation experts, we were joined by a delegation from UNRWA and OCHA. All of them observed the process of recovery.”

Another Civil Defence crew’s testimony, which was obtained by Euro-Med Monitor, claims that the victims were cruelly tortured and killed by the occupation forces. The body of one Civil Defence member was wearing handcuffs, while others were discovered in a state of partial undress, and additional victims were found to have suffered from extreme torturethat led to their deaths, such as having more than 20 bullets fired into their chest. Most of the victims’ bodies were discovered in a mass grave that was two to three metres deep, thistestimony confirms, suggesting that Israeli soldiers forced the victims out of their cars, killed them in cold blood, and then buried them to hide any evidence of the crime.