[link removed] Share ([link removed])

[link removed]: https%3A%2F%2Fmailchi.mp%2Frightsaction%2F15-palestinian-first-responders-executed-in-rafah Tweet ([link removed]: https%3A%2F%2Fmailchi.mp%2Frightsaction%2F15-palestinian-first-responders-executed-in-rafah)

[link removed] Forward ([link removed])

April 4, 2025


**
Fifteen Palestinian paramedics and first responders executed in Rafah
“No crime in history has been so well documented…, And yet inaction and censorship reign”
------------------------------------------------------------


** [link removed]
------------------------------------------------------------

As Western allies are upset about U.S. taxes on global trade, the U.S., Canada and Western European remain lockstep supporting, enabling and legitimizing Israel’s on-going genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestine. No disagreements here. Nothing to debate or be concerned about. “Carry on”, as Ahmed Moor writes, “Eurovision is just around the corner.”

Below:
* Fifteen Palestinian paramedics and first responders were executed in Rafah. Indifference is all they get (by Ghada Ageel ([link removed]) , 1 Apr 2025, Al Jazeera news)
* Israel executes unarmed Red Crescent paramedics with the west’s blessing. American and European leaders are the authors of this latest atrocity by their Israeli colleagues in Gaza (by Ahmed Moor ([link removed]) , Apr 2025 02, The Guardian)
* Imagine if all those who are silent about the terrible evil being committed in Gaza spoke up. No crime in history has been so well documented by its victims. And yet inaction and censorship reign (by Owen Jones, The Guardian, 19 Mar 2025)

Yet another Israeli war crime is buried in the sand as the world looks away
Fifteen Palestinian paramedics and first responders were executed in Rafah. Indifference is all they get.
By Ghada Ageel ([link removed]) , 1 Apr 2025
[link removed]

People gather around the body of Palestinian paramedic Mohammad Bahloul at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis on March 30, 2025 [AFP]

Every day, Mohammad Bahloul gambled with his own life in the hope of saving others. As a medic in the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), he would step into the unknown each workday, never knowing if he would return to his family.

A week before Eid al-Fitr, Mohammad was dispatched to Rafah’s Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood to recover the wounded and dead in the aftermath of Israeli attacks. Shortly after he and a team of medics and first responders arrived on the scene, Israeli ground troops encircled the area and closed off all the roads in and out. As the PRCS lost contact with its team, rumours began to spread across Rafah that those stuck inside would be massacred.

During the attempts of rescue teams to reach the area, UN workers witnessed civilians trying to flee being shot dead. On March 29, they were finally able to reach the area where the PRCS teams were attacked. There, the teams discovered the mangled remains of ambulances and UN and Civil Defence vehicles as well as a single body – that of Muhammad’s colleague, Anwar Alatar.

On March 30, the first day of Eid al-Fitr, they went back and uncovered 14 more bodies buried in the sand in a mass grave. All of them were still dressed in their uniforms and wearing gloves. Among them were Mohammad and his colleagues Mustafa Khafaja, Ezzedine Sha’at, Saleh Moammar, Rifaat Radwan, Ashraf Abu Labda, Mohammad al-Hila, and Raed al-Sharif.

The killing of these paramedics is not an isolated incident. Israel has been systematically targeting medical and rescue workers as part of its genocidal war – a war against life itself in Gaza. Only in Gaza, medical uniforms and ambulances do not offer protection, which international law affords. Only in Gaza, medical uniforms and ambulances can mark people as targets for execution.

For the seven agonising days in which Mohammad’s fate remained unknown, his father Sobhi Bahloul, a former principal at Bir al-Saba’ High School in Rafah, whom I have known for decades, and his mother Najah, prayed for a miracle to save their son.

They imagined that Mohammad had escaped just before the area was sealed, or that he was hiding under the rubble of a house, or perhaps that he was kidnapped by Israeli soldiers but was still alive.

As Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, said, Palestinians are suffering from an “incurable malady: hope”. Although the Bahloul family dared to hope, they also carried within them the dread that Mohammad would never be seen again.

They knew the stories. In January 2024, the paramedics sent to rescue six-year-old Hind Rajab who lay in a car, injured and bleeding, beside her slain relatives, were also targeted and murdered.

Likewise, in December 2023, the medics dispatched to rescue Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abudaqa, who was bleeding in a street in Khan Younis after being hit by an Israeli drone, were also killed.

For seven long days, hope battled fear. “May God return you and all your colleagues to us safe and sound,” Sobhi wrote on Facebook above a photo of his selfless son.

A photo of Mohammad Bahloul who was killed on March 23 by Israeli soldiers in Rafah
[Courtesy of Sobhi Bahloul]

The family had already suffered so much during the genocide, having lost many loved ones. Early on, they had to flee from their home in eastern Rafah to al-Mawasi in Khan Younis, searching for an illusion called safety.

When the ceasefire was announced, the family marched back to their home in the eastern part of Rafah with thousands of others.

They found their home destroyed but did their best to restore two rooms to functionality where they could sleep. During that period the children resumed their education in makeshift tents because so many schools had been destroyed.

Just a week before Mohammad disappeared, an air raid flattened the house across the street from the family home, and his father’s car was severely damaged. Once again, the family fled, carrying what little they had left. With each displacement, their possessions dwindled – an unbearable reminder that as belongings shrink, so too does dignity.

But Mohammad had no time to help his father pitch another displacement tent. He immediately returned to his duty, working around the clock with his fellow medics in Khan Younis, answering endless calls for help, rushing from one horror to the next. Even during Ramadan, the holiest month of the year, he barely had a moment to break his fast with his family and play with his five children – among them Adam, his three-month-old baby boy.

The holy month ended with the heartbreaking news of his murder.

On Eid, I tried to reach Sobhi, but there was no answer. On his Facebook, I found these painful words: “We mourn our son, Muhammad Sobhi Bahloul, a martyr of duty and humanitarian work. To Allah we belong, and to Him we shall return.”

Despite the Israeli army’s attempt to cover up its crime by burying it in the sand, evidence speaks for what happened. A statement released by the Palestinian Ministry of Health on March 30 said the Israeli forces carried out an execution and that some of the victims were handcuffed and had injuries to the head and chest.

The chief of the UN humanitarian affairs office in Palestine, Jonathan Whittall, said the paramedics and first responders were killed “one by one”.

Israel, of course, used the familiar playbook of denial and obfuscation. It first claimed the paramedics were members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Then it claimed that its soldiers fired on the ambulances because they were “advancing suspiciously toward” them.

Meanwhile, in an act of blatant cynicism, the Israeli government announced it was sending a rescue mission of 22 to Thailand and Myanmar following the deadly earthquake. Ten days earlier, it sent a medical delegation to North Macedonia. From Asia to Europe, it seems acceptable that a country that has massacred more than 1000 health workers and first responders in a territory it occupies illegally can feign humanitarianism abroad.

The Geneva Conventions, which explicitly protect medical personnel in conflict zones, have clearly been rendered meaningless in Gaza. International bodies, designed to uphold human rights, continue their performative outrage while failing to act. Western governments continue to be actively complicit in the genocide by sending weapons and inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite the warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court.

How much longer will the world watch this genocidal violence in silence? There seems to be no end to the barbarity and crimes. The executions of these medics should have been a turning point, a moment of reckoning. Instead, they are yet another testament to the impunity granted to the Zionist apartheid regime.

May the souls of those who died in Tal as-Sultan rest in peace and may the political leaders of the Western world rest in shame.

(Dr Ghada Ageel is a third-generation Palestinian refugee and is currently a visiting professor at the department of political science at the University of Alberta situated at amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), Treaty 6 territory in Canada)

Israel executes unarmed Red Crescent paramedics with the west’s blessing
American and European leaders are the authors of this latest atrocity by their Israeli colleagues in Gaza
By Ahmed Moor ([link removed]) , Apr 2025 02
[link removed]

The Guardian reports ([link removed]) that Israeli troops “killed 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers one by one”. “One by one” is another way of saying one person after another, which is another way of saying premeditated murder. Fifteen times over.

Dr Bashar Murad, the director of health programs at the Palestine Red Crescent, told reporters that one of the men who was executed by the Israelis was on the phone with colleagues. The victim had been injured and was requesting help.

“A few minutes later, during the call, we heard the sound of Israeli soldiers arriving at the location, speaking in Hebrew. The conversation was about gathering the team, with statements like: ‘Gather them at the wall and bring some restraints to tie them.’ This indicated that a large number of the medical staff were still alive.”

The Israeli army, for its part, claimed that the area was “an active combat zone”. Soldiers fired on the ambulances because they were “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals”.

No one believes the army’s lies at this point. They serve a purpose; like all shoddy propaganda or misinformation, they work to obscure what is heartrendingly clear: the destruction of all Palestinian life is a matter of policy for Israel’s army. The genocide is a policy matter in that country.

Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, explained ([link removed]) his country’s logic early on: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true.”

For those who support its actions – most of the Israeli public, if polls ([link removed]) are to be believed – the army misinformation is a signal that the leadership regards the executions as a non-issue. Carry on – Eurovision is just around the corner.

IDF Platoons Use Human Shields, “a Sub-army of Palestinian Slaves”

News of the executions come after an anonymous Israeli soldier wrote a column in the Israeli paper Haaretz ([link removed]) entitled, “In Gaza, Almost Every IDF Platoon Keeps a Human Shield, a Sub-army of Palestinian Slaves.”

In it, he describes how widespread the practice of utilizing human shields is in the Israeli army:

“Today, almost every platoon keeps a [human shield] and no infantry force enters a house before a [human shield] clears it. This means there are four [human shields] in a company, twelve in a battalion, and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.”

I was born in Tal al-Sultan, where the Israeli troops executed the paramedics. I know how far the neighborhood is from the beach, and what the offshore wind feels like in the spring. I remember what the Philadelphi route – the barrier between Gaza and Egypt – looked like the last time the Israelis occupied it. Now, Tal al-Sultan is hell on earth, which is what an Israeli military leader promised ([link removed]) to make it at the start of the genocide, 18 months ago.

When I first learned that Israeli men had zip-tied the paramedics before executing them, I thought of their terror – how I would feel in their place. I imagined them in constraints and lined up, facing the unbridled malice of their executioners. Did they think of their wives and children – the pain of being separated from them forever? Did they still their hearts – or find peace in their final moments?

Ashraf Abu Labda, Raed Al-Sharif, Mohammed Bahloul, Mohammed Hilieh, Mustafa Khafaja, Saleh Muammar, Rifaat Radwan and Ezzedine Shaat, and their colleagues whose names I haven’t been able to find were heroes. They spent their last hours on earth on a mission to render aid, to save people. Instead, we learn that they were in a race to the grave. And for what?

The murderers’ state of mind is hinted at by the aftermath of the crime. The Israeli soldiers dug a mass grave to hide their victims’ bodies. They crushed an ambulance under a bulldozer and attempted to bury that too. I wondered briefly if their crimes would haunt them, before I realized it didn’t matter.

The Israeli men who executed 15 unarmed paramedics got away with it. Whether the Israelis enjoyed themselves as they murdered their victims, or whether they will blitz their brains with drugs to forget doesn’t matter. Just as with the men who executed ([link removed]) Hind Rajab, a five-year-old child, individually, they will have got away with it because their society offers them safe haven. All of Europe and the US is their playground.

Nor will global leaders intervene to end the mass murder which has been punctuated by this latest obscenity. Some of them – such as Emmanuel Macron, who called for a ceasefire ([link removed]) , might appear to want to end the slaughter. After all, dead babies in incubators and paramedics in a mass grave are unpleasant garlands to wear. But 18 months in, they are too deeply implicated.

Who can forget Ursula von der Leyen’s embrace ([link removed]) of Netanyahu? Or Keir Starmer’s affirmation of Israel’s “right ([link removed]) ” to starve Palestinians in Gaza?

Today, those who are tasked with upholding international law have been co-opted by the Israeli leadership, whether they like it or not. The logic of gangland drug dealers and criminals – new members commit crimes to join, and are locked in – prevails.

So far from being complicit, US and European leaders are the authors of this latest atrocity by their Israeli colleagues in Gaza ([link removed]) .

As for the rest of us, we can take note, and we can remember. There will be no Nuremberg for the Palestinians, but we can honor the memory of all those who fought to live. And who were exterminated for having lived at all.

(Ahmed Moor is a Palestinian American writer and recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans)

Imagine if all those who are silent about the terrible evil being committed in Gaza spoke up
No crime in history has been so well documented by its victims. And yet inaction and censorship reign
By Owen Jones, The Guardian, 19 Mar 2025
[link removed]

Israel’s genocide was only on pause: for Palestinians woken on Monday night by a vicious wave of airstrikes, the resumption was no less shocking. More than 400 people ([link removed]) – many of them children – were slaughtered in a matter of hours, in an assault that reportedly received the “green light” from Donald Trump ([link removed]) .

This mayhem was swiftly followed by evacuation orders – that is, forced displacement – raising the possibility of renewed ground operations.

Israel’s excuse? A confected claim that Hamas hasn’t observed the terms of January’s so-called ceasefire agreement – the terms of which Israel itself has broken over and over again.

In the wake of the attacks, CNN reported ([link removed]) that Israel’s onslaught threw “doubt on the fragile ceasefire”. Orwellian doesn’t even begin to describe such framing.

As it is, there was no “ceasefire”: not if your definition is firing ceasing. A single Israeli ([link removed]) has been reported to have died in Gaza during the “ceasefire”: a contractor killed by the Israeli army, who mistook him for a Palestinian. A reported 150 Palestinians ([link removed]) have been killed in Gaza during this “ceasefire”, and dozens others butchered in the West Bank.

Here is an example of how Israeli violence is endlessly indulged and Palestinian life is stripped of any meaning. If just one Israeli soldier had been killed by a Hamas militant, I predict many politicians and media outlets would have immediately pronounced the ceasefire over. This same narrative is why we are led to believe that peace prevailed before 7 October ([link removed]) , even when 238 Palestinians – 44 of them children – had been killed in the previous nine months.

Future generations may well ask: “How was a crime that obscene facilitated for so long?” After all, thanks to mobile phones and the internet, no crime in history has been so well documented by its victims as it happened. As they have done for 529 days, Gaza’s survivors post the evidence of their own extermination on social media, hoping – in vain – that enough consciences will be pricked to end the genocidal mayhem. A dead baby in a rainbow jumpsuit; a grieving father playing with the pigtail of his daughter for the last time; entire families covered in shrouds, their bloodlines wiped from the civil registry.

No crime has been so evidenced by experts as it happened. Last week, a new UN report ([link removed]) detailed Israel’s sexual and reproductive violence: like the killing of pregnant women, the rape of male detainees with objects ranging from vegetables to broomsticks, the destruction of an IVF clinic ([link removed]) with its 4,000 embryos.

Waging war on Palestinians’ ability to reproduce were termed “genocidal acts”.

There are limitless examples of other such acts. Report after report has detailed Israel’s destruction of civilian infrastructure – homes, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches; its obliteration of 83% ([link removed]) of all plant life, more than 80% ([link removed]) of agricultural land, 95% of cattle ([link removed]) ; and its ruin of more than 80% of water ([link removed]) and sanitation infrastructure. Israel has deliberately and systematically rendered Gaza uninhabitable. This is why – from Amnesty International to scholars such as Omer Bartov
([link removed]) , the world-renowned Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies – there is a consensus among the relevant specialists that Israel is committing genocide.

And no crime has been so confessed to by its perpetrators as it happened. Israel announced a total blockade on all humanitarian aid entering Gaza 17 days ago, an incontrovertible violation of international law.

Last week, Israel’s environment minister declared ([link removed]) the “only solution for the Gaza Strip is to empty it of Gazans”, one of countless statements of criminal and genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders and officials in the past 17 months. Israel has made no attempt to disguise its belief that the civilian population has collective guilt – “human beasts” who deserve only “damage” and “hell”, as one Israeli general ([link removed]) said at the start – or its intent to raze Gaza ([link removed]) to the ground.

Israeli soldiers have joyously posted ([link removed]) their crimes online, whooping, cheering, singing as they detonated civilians’ homes and abused detainees.

How can an obscenity so documented, evidenced and confessed to – an obscenity facilitated by western weapons and diplomatic support – persist for so long? No one in western politics or media circles can plausibly say, “I did not know what was really happening.”

In a rational world, cheerleaders of this abomination would be regarded as monsters with no place in public life. You cannot, after all, justify the Rwandan genocide and expect anything other than to become a pariah.

But it is those who opposed Israel’s depravity who have been deplatformed ([link removed]) , shut down ([link removed]) , censored ([link removed]) , sacked ([link removed]) , arrested ([link removed]) and – in the case of the Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil – detained and potentially deported ([link removed]) .

By turning the world on its head, the most brazen and systematic attack on free speech in the west since McCarthyism has achieved its primary goal: widespread silence over a crime of historic proportions among those with power and influence.

There are politicians who have unequivocally called this crime what it is, but they are marginalised and disciplined ([link removed]) . There are mainstream journalists who speak the truth ([link removed]) , but they are few. There are celebrities who use their platform to tell the truth – such as Gary Lineker, Paloma Faith ([link removed]) , Khalid Abdala ([link removed]) and Juliet Stevenson ([link removed]) – but they are isolated.

The silent are scared about their careers and incomes, and not irrationally so. But Gaza’s survivors are scared about starvation, disease, being burned alive and suffocated under rubble. Silence in the face of injustice is always a sin; when your government is facilitating genocide, it is a moral crime. In every atrocity in history, the silent are always principal players.

If all those who know a terrible evil is being committed spoke out, what would now happen? Ministers would resign from governments. Newspapers and news bulletins would not only lead with Israel’s atrocities, they would correctly frame them as heinous crimes, underpinned with a drumbeat – that something drastic must be done to stop them. Demands for an arms embargo ([link removed]) and sanctions on Israel would become impossible to ignore.

Rather than those who opposed genocide being hounded and vilified, it would be those complicit in genocide who would be emptied from public life.

Many of the silent undoubtedly feel guilt, and they should. Through their cowardice, they have played a pivotal role in normalising some of the worst barbarism of the 21st century. Ending silence doesn’t involve handwringing and platitudes about how sad you are about civilians dying: it means calling a crime for what it is, and demanding accountability for those who facilitated it.

Time is running out for the traumatised, maimed, starving people of Gaza. So is time for those who want to salvage their conscience.

U.S. and Western-backed genocides as policy, from Guatemala to Palestine

Rights Action does not lightly denounce Israel’s U.S. and Western-backed ethnic cleansing death and destruction in Palestine. We remember the genocides and scorched earth massacres carried out by U.S. and Western-backed military regimes in Guatemala in the 1970s- 80s, targeting and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, a majority being Mayan indigenous.

During the worst years (1978-1983) of genocides and massacres, U.S. allies/“proxy states” Britain, France, Israel, Chile’s Pinochet regime and the Argentinean Generals also provided military aid, weapons and training to the Guatemalan regimes.

Today, Rights Action continues to funds on-going work and struggle, led by victim-survivors of the genocides, for truth, memory and justice. Over 40 years later, there has been almost no justice or reparations for these Western-backed atrocities … all legitimized at the time as part of the “war on communism”.

The devastating legacies of the genocides and State repression are an on-going lived experience today in the lives and communities of the survivors, their children and grand-children.

Accountability for U.S. and Western complicity

As we try to do with our work in Guatemala and Honduras, Rights Action encourages and supports education, organizing and activism work to hold the U.S.-led West legally and politically accountable for supporting, enabling and legitimizing Israel’s systematic crimes against humanity and war crimes against Palestine and the Palestinian people.

Urgent need to diversify media sources

Rights Action urges any and every one to diversify their news sources, as a necessary antidote to the oftentimes harmful, misleading reporting coming from much of the mainstream government and corporate media in the U.S., the E.U. and Canada. We recommend daily news provided by Al Jazeera news ([link removed]), Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org), The Real News ([link removed]).

We urge everyone to get involved with, follow news feeds of
* Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East: [link removed] ([link removed])
* Jewish Voices for Peace (U.S.): [link removed] ([link removed])
* Independent Jewish Voices (Canada): [link removed]
* Palestinian Youth Movement: [link removed] ([link removed])
* CAIR California Resource Guide: [link removed] ([link removed])
* Palestine Solidarity Campaign: [link removed] ([link removed])
* If Not Now (U.S.): [link removed]
* If Not Now (Cda): [link removed]
* Ceasefire Now: [link removed]
* Ceasefire Today: [link removed] ([link removed])
* BDS Movement: [link removed] ([link removed])
* Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine: [link removed]
* Double Down News: [link removed] ([link removed])
* Medical Aid for Palestinians: [link removed] ([link removed])
* Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor: [link removed]
* Canadian Foreign Policy Institute: [link removed] ([link removed])
* CODEPINK: [link removed]
* World BEYOND War Canada: [link removed] ([link removed])

Tax-Deductible Donations (Canada & U.S.)

To support land and environmental defenders, and human rights, justice and democracy defense struggles in Honduras and Guatemala, make check to "Rights Action" and mail to:
* U.S.: Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887
* Canada: Box 82858, RPO Cabbagetown Toronto, ON, M5A 3Y2

Credit-Card Donations: [link removed]
Direct deposits, write to: [email protected] (mailto:[email protected])
Donations of securities, write to: [email protected] (mailto:[email protected])

*******
Please share and re-post this information
*******

More info: [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) , www.rightsaction.org
e-Newsletter: [link removed]
Previous e-Newsletters: [link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed] ([link removed])
[link removed]
[link removed] Facebook ([link removed])
[link removed] Twitter ([link removed])
[link removed] Website ([link removed])
[link removed] Instagram ([link removed])
[link removed] YouTube ([link removed])

============================================================
Copyright © 2025 Rights Action, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you are one of our subscriptor

Our mailing address is:
Rights Action
Box 50887
20091-0887
Washington, DC 0
USA
** unsubscribe from this list ([link removed])
** update subscription preferences ([link removed])
Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp
[link removed]