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forensic architecture
Investigation Details IDF's 'Execution-Style' Massacre of Gaza Medics
"What this investigation reveals is that there was a shoot first policy, and that is unlawful under international law," said one legal expert.
Feb 23, 2026
An investigation published Monday meticulously dissects last year's killing by Israeli soldiers of 15 Palestinian aid workers in southern Gaza and the Israel Defense Force's subsequent efforts to cover up the massacre, which the Palestine Red Crescent Society called "one of the darkest moments" of the US-backed genocide.
IDF soldiers fired nearly a thousand bullets—at least eight of them at point-blank range—during the March 23, 2025 attack on a convoy of Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and Palestinian Civil Defense ambulances and a PCD fire truck in Tel al-Sultan north of Rafah, according to the investigation by Forensic Architecture and Earshot.
"Our investigation confirms that Israeli forces attacked the aid workers while they were traveling in clearly marked humanitarian vehicles, in the absence of any threat or exchange of fire," a summary of the report states. "Spatial and audio analysis conducted in partnership with Earshot reveals the positions from which Israeli soldiers fired on the aid workers—in at least once instance within one to four meters of their victim—over a period of more than two hours."
Eyewitness and survivor testimonies and analysis of various recordings showed that some of the aid workers—who included eight PCRS workers, six PCD employees, and one staffer with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. They are among the hundreds of Palestinian humanitarian aid workers killed by Israeli forces since October 2023, including more than 370 members of UNRWA, according to the agency.
The new report shows how IDF troops ambushed and attacked the convoy, firing on its vehicles. IDF spokesperson Col. Nadav Shoshani claimed that unmarked convoy vehicles "were identified advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals" and that nine of the first responders were “terrorists from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad."
However, as is often the case, IDF officials could not support their claim with evidence, and video recorded by PRCS worker Refaat Radwan before he was killed shows clearly marked ambulances traveling with lights on and sirens wailing.
The IDF's lies poured fuel on the fire of international outrage over the massacre. Trey Yingst, chief international correspondent at staunchly pro-Israel Fox News, said that Israel's version of the massacre story was "clearly not true."
Gaza authorities previously reported that some of the victims had apparently survived the initial attack and were handcuffed and executed before being dumped together into a deep hole and buried along with their destroyed vehicles.
Survivors Munther Abed and Assad al-Nassasra testified "that Israeli soldiers opened fire on the rescue convoy as the aid workers exited their vehicles and approached the ambulance on foot," according to the new investigation.
"Asaad recalled crawling toward an ambulance where two colleagues—Muhammad Bahloul and Saleh Muammar—had taken shelter," the publication continues. "Muhammad had been killed, and Saleh was severely wounded. Muhammad al-Hila crawled up behind Asaad, and as the two men embraced, Muhammad was shot and killed."
Autopsies revealed that some of the slain aid workers were shot in the chest and head, with one doctor who examined the bodies calling the "specific and intentional location of shots at close range" indicative of an "execution-style" killing.
Of the bodies found in the mass grave of victims, “one was beheaded,” according to PRCS spokesperson Mahmoud Basal, who said that “the least harmed among them had at least 20 bullets fired at him."
Jonathan Whittall, who headed the UN humanitarian affairs coordination office in Palestine at the time, told Drop Site Monday that “following our discovery of the mass grave, the narrative from Israeli forces shifted multiple times; we were fed several versions of a blatant lie."
The IDF cover-up attempt was underway. The new investigation says that the IDF "deliberately concealed and disturbed evidence, and in the weeks after repeatedly mischaracterized the incident and denied any wrongdoing."
Meanwhile, survivor al-Nassasra was captured by Israeli troops and taken to the Sde Teiman military prison in Israel's Negev Desert, where he was jailed for 37 days and tortured during interrogations. Sde Teiman gained global infamy following reports of torture, rape, and murder of detainees. The IDF is investigating the deaths of at least 36 Palestinians at the lockup, including one who died after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton.
Israeli soldiers pulled Abed, the other survivor, from his ambulance, bound his hands, beat him, and detained him on the ground near where the other vehicles had been ambushed. Abed testified that he was stripped, beaten, threatened with death, and interrogated before being released later that same day.
Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Drop Site that the new investigation "presents a very compelling case, and honestly, a very devastating one.”
"What this investigation reveals is that there was a shoot first policy, and that is unlawful under international law," she continued.
“When you zoom out and look at this in the context of the way the Israeli assault has been carried out over many months and years in Gaza and we see that there is a pattern and practice of attacks on medical personnel—similar to journalists and other groups that are explicitly and uniquely protected as classes of civilians in international humanitarian law—it raises even more questions and deep concern about the lack of accountability, because what we know is that impunity breeds repetition," Gallagher added.
There has been no accountability for those who ordered, carried out, and tried to cover up the paramedic massacre, for the killers of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza—most of them women and children—or for the countless victims of Israeli arbitrary imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, and other thoroughly documented crimes.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, the Biden and Trump administrations have unwaveringly backed Israel's war, providing tens of billions of dollars in armed aid and diplomatic cover including vetoes of numerous UN Security Council cease-fire resolutions.
Adding insult to injury, the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—whose aid sites have been called "death traps" where more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed—established a distribution center atop the mass grave where the massacred paramedics were buried.
“Now, the US, under the so-called Board of Peace, plans to build a ‘New Rafah’ over this crime scene," Whittall told Drop Site. "Without meaningful accountability, ‘New Rafah’ will be a monument to impunity.”
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Report Details Israel's 'Architecture of Genocidal Starvation' in Gaza
The new report comes as the world's top authority on hunger crises officially declared a full-blown famine in the Palestinian territory.
Aug 22, 2025
As the world's leading authority on hunger crises officially declared a catastrophic famine in Gaza, a report published Friday details how Israel has dismantled the time-tested civilian aid distribution model and replaced it with a military-based system in which many Palestinians are not only dying from starvation but are also being killed while trying to obtain food.
Forensic Architecture (FA)—a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London—and World Peace Foundation (WPF), a philanthropic organization affiliated with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts—published The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation in Gaza, March-August 2025, "revealing how... Israel has dismantled the proven and internationally-backed 'civilian model' of aid distribution, replacing it with a 'military model' which furthers Israel's military and political objectives in Gaza while starving the region's civilian population."
"Aid can be lethal when used in a manipulative way," an introduction to the report states. "We have unpacked the architecture of starvation imposed by Israel in Gaza. It is composed of acts of construction and destruction: the destruction of Palestinian agriculture and food sovereignty, the destruction of Palestinian civil society, and the construction of death traps."
A report by @forensicarchi.bsky.social & WPF examines two models for aid in #Gaza, showing how Israel has dismantled the internationally-backed ‘civilian model’, replacing it with a ‘military model’ which furthers Israel’s objectives while starving civilians.Read more here: shorturl.at/DYpkA
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— World Peace Foundation (@worldpeacefdtn.bsky.social) August 22, 2025 at 5:07 AM
The report opens by noting a March 2024 provisional order by the International Court of Justice in The Hague—a product of the tribunal's ongoing genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa—directing the Israeli government to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel ignored the order and ramped up its forced starvation of Gaza.
"In Gaza, under the Israeli system of aid distribution, intentional mass starvation is happening on two levels, the biological starvation of individuals through the provision of starvation rations, or no rations at all," the report's authors wrote, as well as "the destruction of the group as a whole, through collective dehumanization, separating the population from its land, and the disintegration of a functioning Palestinian society in Gaza."
According to the report, Israel has dismantled the "civilian model" of aid distribution by:
- Attacking essential aid infrastructure like warehouses, distribution points, kitchens, and bakeries;
- Restricting the supply of aid into Gaza by international humanitarian organizations; and
- Creating the conditions for aid diversion, including attacking groups tasked with securing aid routes, and failing to intervene in the diversion of aid in areas controlled by the Israeli military.
The report says Israel has implemented a "dangerous and deadly" system in which there are only four ration stations run by the US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), "all located in military zones."
Described by many as "death traps," GHF's aid points have been the sites of regular Israeli massacres of desperate Palestinian aid-seekers. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded while trying to obtain aid in Gaza, including more than 850 people slain at or near GHF centers. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) whistleblowers have said they were ordered to fire live bullets and artillery shells into crowds of desperate aid-seekers, even when they posed no security threat—accounts corroborated by a former US special forces colonel who resigned from GHF.
The new report found at least 64 incidents of Palestinian civilians "being attacked by the Israeli military while seeking aid, including 25 incidents at and around GHF ration stations," as well as dozens of attacks on aid infrastructure, humanitarian workers, and police.
Gaza's Government Media Office said earlier this year that more than 1,500 humanitarian workers were killed in Gaza since October 2023, including medical and civil defense personnel. The United Nations humanitarian affairs office said this week that 181 aid workers were killed while working in Gaza last year—accounting for nearly half of all such fatalities worldwide. Israel has baselessly accused many of these slain aid workers—especially employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—of being members of Hamas or other militant groups.
The new report also notes that "airdropped aid landed in active combat zones, or in densely populated areas, where airdrops have killed people, and destroyed shelters." Palestinians have also drowned while trying to reach aid airdropped into the Mediterranean Sea, which the IDF has prohibited Gazans from entering under penalty of death.
Furthermore, the report's authors found that Palestinians must walk an average of more than three-and-a-half miles to the nearest GHF aid point, with such centers being open for an average of just 10 minutes at a time between June 19 and July 4.
The publication also highlights the 58 evacuation orders to which Gazans have been subjected. Critics have called "evacuation" a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Israeli operations, including Gideon's Chariots and the newly launched Gideon's Chariots 2, are aimed at conquering Gaza and ethnically cleansing its residents to locations including a proposed concentration camp that would be built over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah.
The report concludes that Israel is "instrumentalizing aid" in order to:
- Enforce displacement and reconcentration;
- Make reaching aid deadly and dangerous;
- Undermine civil order, dismantle the social fabric of Palestinian society, and dehumanize Palestinians; and
- Permit and enable the diversion of aid.
"The dehumanization of Palestinians, the stripping of basic dignity, and the tearing apart of the fabric of the community are not accidental byproducts of the mass starvation inflicted on the people of Gaza," the report's authors assert. "There is every reason to believe that these are what Israel intends through its militarized ration system."
The report's publication adds to the body of research on Israel's weaponized starvation—one of the alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Earlier this week, Amnesty International—one of a growing number of human rights defenders around the world accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza—said the country's government is "carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being, and social fabric of Palestinian life."
Last month, WPF executive director Alex de Waal, a leading global authority on famine, asserted that "there is no case since World War II of starvation that is being so minutely designed and controlled" as Israel is doing in Gaza.
"This is preventable starvation. It is entirely man-made," de Waal added. "And every stage of this has been predicted, and at every stage action could have been taken—by Israel, by the international authorities, [the] international community, those who back Israel—to prevent what is happening now... Those steps have simply not been taken."
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Hind Rajab Killing: Analysis Finds Israeli Tank Fired 335 Bullets Into Car at Close Range
"It's not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including children," an investigation of the five-year-old Palestinian girl's death found.
Jun 22, 2024
An Israeli tank or tanks likely fired the bullets that killed five-year-old Palestinian Hind Rajab and six relatives as they sat in a car in northern Gaza in January, according to an analysis released Friday that adds to evidence of the Israeli military's role in an indiscriminate killing which galvanized anti-war protests around the world earlier this year.
A tank had to have been positioned between 13 and 23 meters from the family car when it fired the shots that killed Layan Hamada, Hind Rajab's 15-year-old cousin, and it's "not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including children," wrote the authors of the analysis, which was completed by U.K. research agency Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, with Earshot, an NGO, and Al Jazeera journalists.
The investigators found 335 bullet holes on the body of the Kia Picanto the family was using.
An Israeli tank also likely killed the two Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) paramedics who came to the scene, the analysis found. The new analysis refutes Israel's contention that its forces were not responsible for the killings, which caused an international outcry.
More amazing investigative journalism by my colleagues @ForensicArchi on the murder of #HindRajab by Israeli forces: "it is not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians". No UK media outlet has picked it up yet https://t.co/GLSpgVdKps
— Des Freedman (@lazebnic) June 22, 2024
On January 29, seven extended family members including the young Rajab tried to flee Gaza City by car. Rajab remained alive for at least three hours after the other six had been killed, and was on the phone with the PRCS, pleading for help. "I'm so scared, please come," she said, according to The Guardian.
Hamada, the 15 year old, had herself been on the phone with the PRCS when she was killed. A released audio recording of her final moments, in which she explains that a tank is next to the car and shooting at them, went viral.
⏺️Audio recording of the moment gunfire was directed at 15-year-old Layan Hamadeh while she was speaking on the phone with the Palestine Red Crescent team.
💔Layan was killed, and 6-year-old Hind remained trapped inside the car surrounded by the occupation tanks and soldiers.… pic.twitter.com/iMHGdoRcni
— PRCS (@PalestineRCS) January 30, 2024
The bodies of the seven family members and two paramedics, whose vehicle was attacked nearby, were found 12 days later, on February 10.
The new analysis broadly fits with findings of an in-depth investigation of the family's killing conducted by The Washington Post in April, adding new details and strengthening the case that Israeli forces were culpable. Following the new release, Medhi Hasan, editor-in-chief of Zeteo News, argued that those who continue to support the killing of Palestinian children are sociopaths.
Columbia student protesters honored Rajab by naming an occupied academic building "Hind's Hall" in late April. Rajab was generally reported as having been six years old at the time of her death, but The Guardian issued a correction in May stating that she had been just five years old.
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