A United Nations team waited for days in vain for permission from the Israeli occupation forces to search for a group of Palestinian emergency workers who disappeared after being shot by Israeli soldiers, The Wall Street Journal reported in an investigation published Saturday. “Then, a call from the Israeli military ended their wait. The Israeli military pointed to a mass grave marked by a white electricity pole in the Gaza border town of Rafah,” according to Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza and the West Bank, who received the call.

The UN team found 14 bodies in the grave, including eight paramedics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and six members of the Palestinian Civil Defense, which includes firefighters and paramedics. The body of a UN employee was also found elsewhere, another paramedic is missing, and another survived.

“I could hear gunfire, but I had no idea where it was coming from,” surviving paramedic Munther Jihad Abed told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. Many of the badly decomposed bodies exhumed were still wearing the orange vests of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, according to dozens of videos and photos reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Some were wearing medical gloves. The mangled wreckage of ambulances and other medical vehicles was buried in the sand.

Sameh Hamed, a forensic expert who examined the bodies at Nasser Hospital, said on Friday that their decomposition and animal damage made it difficult to find evidence. He added that the bodies showed multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, abdomen, and head. He said the bullets were mostly from M16 rifles.

"All the bodies had gunshot wounds concentrated in the upper body," said Hamed, the head of forensics in Khan Younis Governorate. He added that one of the bodies bore signs of a gunshot wound to the back of the head, while another had been shot six times in the torso. The discovery of the bodies sparked condemnation from the United Nations, and the Israeli military opened an investigation into why the rescue workers were killed and buried in a corner of the besieged enclave.

"This is a war without borders, and there must be accountability," Whittall said.

The war in the Gaza Strip has killed more than 50,000 people, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Israel says it is targeting militants, trying to minimize collateral damage, and blames Hamas for the fighting among civilians.

The Israeli military said: "The incident that occurred on March 23, 2025, is under careful investigation." "All allegations, including any documents circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and thoroughly examined to understand the sequence of events and address the situation."

Both sides agree on the basic facts of the incident. In the early hours of March 23, just days after Israel ended its two-month ceasefire and resumed its war on Gaza, Israeli forces fired on ambulances entering a neighborhood in the city of Rafah, located along the border with Egypt. The shooting killed several crew members who had arrived to assist those wounded in an Israeli airstrike. While other ambulances, a fire truck, and a UN vehicle arrived over the next few hours to search for their missing colleagues, they too were hit by Israeli forces.

Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said in a post on Twitter that the vehicles had not been coordinated with the military in advance and moved suspiciously toward the troops with their headlights and emergency signals off. He said the troops returned fire. Israeli soldiers then approached the bodies and checked their identities, he said in a press briefing on Thursday. They concluded that they had killed an alleged Hamas militant, Muhammad Amin Ibrahim al-Shoubaki, whom Israel claims participated in the October 7, 2023, attacks that left some 1,200 dead and 251 hostages and sparked the conflict. Shoshani also claimed that eight other Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants were also killed, saying they were identified through intelligence and information gathered on the ground, without providing further details or their names. The Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment on whether it believed the other six killed were also militants.

The Palestinian Red Crescent, Palestinian Civil Defense, and the United Nations said the dead were unequivocally humanitarian workers. All their names have been publicly released. Shobaki, the alleged Hamas militant, is not on the list of those killed. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on the discrepancy in names. The Palestinian Red Crescent, Palestinian Civil Defense, and the United Nations also said the vehicles were clearly marked with their logos on the day of the incident. Israel did not close the area as a “red zone” until 3:30 a.m. on March 23, when the first ambulances left for Rafah, so the teams were not required to coordinate their movements with the Israeli military, according to Nibal Farsakh, a spokesman for the Palestinian Red Crescent. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on the status of the area. Abed, the only known survivor, said the emergency lights and sirens on the vehicles were activated that morning. He said his ambulance was among the first to be hit. He lay on the ground as bullets struck the vehicle. Minutes later, Israeli forces pulled him from the rubble and pushed him behind a wall, and it was later learned that his two colleagues had been killed.

The occupation soldiers ordered Abed to sit next to paramedic Asaad Nasasra, who was in another ambulance that morning and was blindfolded and handcuffed. They spoke in hushed voices for a few minutes, wondering about the fate of their colleagues. Abed Nasasra said he heard two members of his team chant the Shahada as bullets struck their car.

"That was the last moment I saw him," said Abed, who said he was also blindfolded minutes later. "After that, I don't know what happened to him."