A United Nations team had spent several fruitless days waiting for Israeli forces to permit them to look for a group of Palestinian emergency workers who disappeared after being fired on by Israeli soldiers. Then, a call came in from Israel’s military that would end their wait.
It pointed them to a mass grave marked by a white electricity pole in the Gaza border town of Rafah, said Jonathan Whittall, the head of the United Nations’ humanitarian office in Gaza and the West Bank who received the call.
The U.N. team found 14 bodies in the grave, including eight paramedics with the Palestine Red Crescent Society and six members of the Palestinian Civil Defense, which includes firefighters and emergency responders. The body of a U.N. worker was found in a different location. Another paramedic is missing. One survived.
“I was hearing gunfire, but had no idea where it was coming from,” the surviving paramedic, Monzer Jehad Abed, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.