Survivor recounts Gaza paramedic killings

A survivor from the mass killing of Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers in Gaza has said he saw Israeli troops open fire on a succession of Red Crescent ambulances and rescue vehicles and then use a bulldozer to bury the wreckage in a pit.

- Malak A Tantesh Gaza Julian Borger

Munther Abed, a 27-year-old Red Crescent volunteer, was in the back of the first ambulance to arrive on the scene of an airstrike in the Hashashin district of Rafah before dawn on 23 March, when it came under intense Israeli fire. His two Red Crescent colleagues sitting in the front were killed, but he survived by throwing himself to the floor of the vehicle.

"The door opened, and there they were - Israeli special forces in military uniforms, armed with rifles, green lasers and night-vision goggles," Abed told the Guardian. "They dragged me out of the ambulance, keeping me face down to avoid seeing what had happened to my colleagues."

He was beaten, detained with his hands tied and made to lie on the ground, from where he could see some of what happened as other friends and colleagues arrived in ambulances and fire engines, each running into a hail of gunfire. In all, eight Red Crescent ambulance crew members and paramedics, six civil defence rescue workers and a UN employee died.

Their bodies were found alongside their crushed vehicles last weekend in a sandy pit that Abed had watched the troops dig. Other witnesses have told the Guardian that some of the dead had had their hands or feet tied.

A Red Crescent ambulance officer, Assad al-Nassara, was still unaccounted for yesterday, but Abed said he had seen him alive and in Israeli detention in the vicinity of the killings. So far, Abed is the only one to return alive and tell his story.

He was volunteering on 23 March at the ambulance station at the British field hospital in al-Mawasi, a camp for displaced people, when the call came in shortly after 4am from the emergency services dispatcher in Hashashin. Abed jumped in the back of an ambulance that left immediately. His friend Mostafa Khufaga was driving, with another ambulance officer, Ezzedine Shaath, beside him.