JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The Israeli military is conducting an investigation into an incident in Gaza in which a number of emergency and aid workers were killed, a military spokesperson said on Thursday, while rejecting that the killings could be called an “execution”.
Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani said the military’s Southern Command had 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”.
Last month, the bodies of 15 workers from the Red Crescent, Palestinian Civil Defense 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 Israeli forces, which resumed military operations in Gaza on March 18 after a two month truce, had targeted the workers. Israel has said that on March 23 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 a briefing with journalists.
Asked how the troops knew that there were militants in the cars, 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”.
He said 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”.
“Not an execution,” he said.
(Reporting by James Mackenzie; Editing by Alison Williams and Peter Graff)
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