Israeli military says it is investigating Gaza emergency and aid worker killings

The Israeli military is investigating the killings of a number of aid workers in Gaza, a spokesperson said on Thursday. Reuters has reported that Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani rejected the claim that the killings were an “execution”.

The occupation army’s military’s Southern Command has apparently transferred the investigation to a general staff mechanism outside the chain of command to establish what had happened and “hold accountable people if we need to,” said Shoshani.

The bodies of 15 workers from the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Palestinian Civil Defence and United Nations were found buried in a shallow grave at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, close to their wrecked vehicles.

The Red Crescent said that Israeli forces, which resumed military operations in Gaza on 18 March after a two-month truce, had targeted the workers. Israel has said that on 23 March its troops fired on vehicles bearing Red Crescent markings that were carrying Hamas militants, and killed nine of them.

“Our initial investigation found that there were terrorists in these cars, using those Red Crescent cars,” Shoshani told journalists. Asked how the troops knew that there were “militants” in the vehicles, he said, “It is based on different ways of intelligence and also based on the information gathered on the ground at the time of the event.”

The spokesman said that occupation troops later also fired on other unmarked vehicles that approached without emergency lights or prior coordination.

He denied a report in Britain’s Guardian newspaper that some bodies in the grave had been found with hands tied, and rejected the term “execution” to describe what happened during what he called “an operational event”.

READ: UN human rights chief condemns killing of Gaza humanitarian workers by Israeli army