“We have collected his body instead of celebrating id”

“My heart and soul died when Rifaat was killed,” says Haja Mohammad, the mother of Palestinian paramedic, who was one of the 15 emergency workers killed by Israeli troops in southern Gaza last month.

The 23 -year -old Rifaat Radvan traveled to an ambulance of the Palestinian Society of the Red Crescent (PRCS) in a convoy of emergency vehicles when he was firing on the outskirts of Rafa on March 23.

“I never expected him to be killed, all the more so that the area was classified as” green “, which means safe and open to ambulances,” she adds.

The Israeli military initially claimed that the troops had opened fire because the convoy approached them “suspiciously” in darkness without headlights or flashing emergency lights.

However, Video filmed by rifaat and found on his phone after his body has been restoredHe showed that vehicles lights were included when they answered a call to help wounded people.

“Forgive me, mother … This is the path I chose to help people,” Rifaat can be heard in the video shortly before he was killed in the background of the sound of heavy shooting.

Umm Mohammed believes he wants her forgiveness because he knew she would never see him again.

“I entrusted to the Rifaat to God every time he goes out to work,” she says. “He was brave, traveling through a gas from north to south.”

Rifaat began voluntarily with CRC after Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza after Hamas’s unprecedented cross -border attack on October 7, 2023.

Ummm Mohammed says her son enjoyed humanitarian work.

“He even transported the wounded to move to Egypt for treatment through the intersection of Rafa.”

Umm Mohammed explains that on the day he died, Rifaat came out with an ambulance after reports of several killed in Israeli air stroke.

“I didn’t know he would be one of them (too),” she says.

It was a week before his body and those of his colleagues were found buried in a shallow grave on March 30.

“Instead of celebrating Aid Al-Fitre with Rifaat, we went with the Red Cross to collect his body from Nasser Hospital in Han Enis to bury him,” she recalls.

“It was poorly decomposed and they did not allow me to see it.”

Ummm Mohammed says he was “an absolutely beautiful” human being and the only supporter of her and his father after all his brothers and sisters married.

Following the opening of the video footage, an Israeli military official changed his original account that claims that vehicles are approaching without their lights. The employee said the person who gave the bill was “wrong”.

The official employee also said that the troops were perceived by emergency workers as a threat because of an early meeting in the area and that at least six of the killed were Hamas operatives without providing any evidence.

The troops buried the bodies, including Rifaat, in the sand to protect them from wild animals, the employee said.

They were not discovered a week after the incident, as international agencies, including the UN, could not organize a safe passage into the area or find the place.

When the UN led team found the bodies, they also found a rifaat mobile phone containing footage of the incident.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) promised a “in -depth examination” of the incident, saying that “it would understand the sequence of events and the processing of the situation”.

PRCS claims that emergency workers were aimed at a “series of intentional attacks” that represent a “full -fledged war crime” and require an independent international investigation.

“We need justice for the victims. We must ensure that all responsible are reported. With this, crimes will continue to happen,” said Prcs spokesman Nebal Farsach on Wednesday.

“I have already lost 27 colleagues from the PRC. They were all killed while doing their humanitarian work. All of them were killed while wearing the red crescent emblem. This is never acceptable. It should never have happened. We are not a whole.

Mander Abed, a paramedic who survived the incident, says he and his colleagues were fired without warning.

“I descended to the floor at the back of the vehicle and did not hear the sound of my colleagues, except for their deaths,” He told the BBC last weekS

“Then the Israeli special forces arrested me and nailed my head to the ground so as not to see what happened to my team.”

Holding tears, Mander added: “When I realized everyone was martyrs, it crushed me. They were my second family … My brothers, friends, my relatives.

“I wanted to die of the horror of what I saw.”

He says his phone was confiscated when he was detained.

“They asked me for 15 hours with beatings, insults and physical and verbal torture,” he adds.

The BBC has made its claims to IDF, but it is yet to answer.

The PRC said the area where emergency workers were not classified by the Israeli military as a “red zone”, which means that no prior coordination was required to access the site and that the video shows that Israeli military vehicles were not visible in the area.

It says preliminary forensic reports show that the paramedics were killed by “multiple firearms in the upper bodies”, which he described as “additional evidence of premeditated murder”.

He also rejected the IDF’s internal investigation and rejected the IDF’s charge that Hamas’s operating directors were among those killed.

IDF said in a statement on Monday that his head of staff, Lieutenant Eiol Zamir, was presented with the findings of the initial investigation of the incident and instructed him to be “persecuted in greater depth and completed in the coming days by the General Staff Investigation Mechanism.”

“All claims raised on the incident will be considered through the mechanism and will be presented detailed and thoroughly solved by how to deal with the event,” she added.

About 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage at Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Since then, more than 50,750 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the territory.

A fire termination deal, announced in January, collapsed in March and there are currently 59 hostages that are still being held in Gaza, 24 of which are thought to be still alive.