This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Gaza, where almost one year ago, Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers in a sustained two-hour attack on a rescue convoy and then attempted to cover it up. The soldiers buried 14 bodies in a shallow mass grave and crushed the rescue vehicles with heavy machinery. The ambush took place in the early hours of March 23, 2025, in the area of Tel al-Sultan in southern Gaza. Those killed included eight aid workers with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, six Palestinian civil defense workers and a U.N. relief agency staffer.
The independent research groups Forensic Architecture and Earshot have painstakingly recreated a minute-by-minute accounting of what took place. The 11-month investigation draws on audio and video recordings from the scene, open source and satellite imagery, and the in-depth testimony of two survivors. This is a clip.
ASSAAD AL-NASSASRA: [translated] To give you an idea, it was still dark. We crossed the ambush site without noticing the vehicle. Then we met Saleh and Ashtraf’s ambulance at the Iqlimi crossroad.
AMY GOODMAN: Forensic Architecture built a 3D model based on the testimony and available visuals, while Earshot used echolocation to analyze the more than 900 shots fired. They concluded that Israeli forces were in an elevated position when they began firing, then moved towards the aid workers while continuously firing.
Paramedic Rifaat Radwan was recording on his cell phone from inside one of the vehicles when the attack started, showing the ambulances had their lights on when the attack started, contradicting Israel’s initial claim that the convoy had approached suspiciously with their lights off.
[sounds of gunfire]
AMY GOODMAN: The sounds of Israeli gunfire were recovered when Radwan’s cell phone was found after his body was exhumed. For more, we are joined by two of the investigators. Samaneh Moafi is assistant director of research with Forensic Architecture. Lawrence Abu Hamdan is the founder and director of Earshot. He has been described as a “private ear” rather than a private eye for his work as an audio investigator, was recently profiled by The New Yorker Magazine. They are both joining us from London. Samaneh, why don’t we start with you? Tell us about the day, what happened, what was understood at the time, and then what you found as you dissected what took place.
SAMANEH MOAFI: On the day, shortly before 4:00 a.m. in the morning, there is an airstrike in Al-Hashashin. Two Red Crescent ambulances are sent to rescue those who are injured, and one of them loses contact. So, time passes. The Red Crescent sends more ambulances to search for the lost ambulance. Then they’re joined by a civil defense ambulance and a fire truck. They find the missing ambulance. They approach it. Then, upon approaching, they’re shot at again. Our investigation brings and shows a detailed analysis of what exactly took place minute by minute from the beginning to the days and weeks and months that followed.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Samaneh, could you also talk about the broader context in which this incident occurred? What the situation was in Gaza at the time when this incident occurred on March 23, last year, 2025?
SAMANEH MOAFI: Of course. A ceasefire had began in January in Gaza on the 19th of January. On the 18th of March, the ceasefire is broken by a series of nighttime airstrikes by the Israeli military. About 400 Palestinians are killed in these nighttime strikes. We have on the 20 of March leaflets dropped by the Israeli military across Gaza with genocidal messages.
The incident, this airstrike in Al-Hashashin, happens on 23rd of March, so 5 days after the break of the ceasefire by the Israeli military. Then the attack happens on one of the ambulances, then it is followed by a kind of an attack and an execution of a convoy of rescue workers who come searching for the missing ambulance.
Then I can kind of also say what happens after. We’ve been able to show that the attack continues for over two hours. So until 7:00 a.m. in the morning where we have the last recording of the night, we can hear sounds of shooting. At about 8:30 a.m., leaflets are dropped in Tel al-Sultan telling people to evacuate their homes.
At this time, we also have a series of earth berms beginning on this area. So we have the construction of pits that then are used for interrogation. We have the construction of checkpoints. And on the very same road, we have the burying of the bodies and we have the burying and crushing of the ambulances and the emergency vehicles. By this point, two U.N. vehicles have also arrived on site and were also attacked.
One of the two survivors of the incident from the Red Crescent, Munther Abed, was used as what he described as a kind of human tool to monitor the checkpoint, to do the work for the Israeli military, to separate Palestinian men from women and then put the ones that the Israelis are saying into interrogation pits. So that is kind of like the early hours. We see the construction of these earth berms at a satellite image that is available from 11:00 a.m. on that morning.
Now, what follows is a destruction of—a clearing of Tel al-Sultan neighborhood, of Rafah. Then what we have is a kind of a turn. We have the militarization of aid. By this point, there has been months that no aid is entering Gaza, and we have kind of like a construction of four sites for distribution of aid. But of course what they’re doing is luring Palestinians in so that they would be killed again. One of these aid distribution sites is actually constructed right by the site of the massacre and the execution of aid workers in Tel al-Sultan.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Lawrence Abu Hamdan into this conversation, this amazing story, the crushing of the ambulances and burying them to hide what had taken place. But Lawrence, can you explain the role of your organization, Earshot, in analyzing the gunshots, what exactly took place, what you found, how many shooters, their locations? Again, you have been called, rather than a private eye, a “private ear.”
LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN: Thank you so much for having us. This is a classic case for an organization like Earshot. We do audio analysis for human rights and environmental advocacy. When we have a case like this where the evidence is really heard but not so much seen—because the main piece of evidence that was taken by Rifaat Radwan, he was holding the camera to his chest as he was covering from the gunfire. And so you see very little but you hear almost everything that happens. And you hear it in stereo. So what we could do is over 11 months analyze each of those gunshots and sort of piece together the whole story of what happened.
What we found out is that they start firing from an elevated position where the vehicles would have been in full view, about 40 meters to the southeast of Rifaat’s position. Then they begin advancing after about four minutes of gunfire. This is really intense gunfire. So in those first five minutes, you are talking about 850 shots fired.
Towards the last minute and thirty seconds of that video, the Israeli soldiers walk in as they’re firing. They move at a walking pace of about one meter per second. Then they arrive at the position of the aid workers. There we start to hear new echoes that we don’t hear on the rest of the recording. Those are the echoes reflecting off the ambulances themselves, indicating that the soldiers are in and amongst the ambulances as they are firing at the aid workers for the last shots. These are when the video cuts, and we assume these are the moments of the execution. They’re within meters of the aid workers.
And actually our analysis could go one step further, is that by sort of looking at the orientation and the organization of the ambulance around the shooter, we could see which was the most likely one that was producing each echo. So each shot produced three echoes and we could configure that and triangulate that between the echoes to find that for one of the shots, the 862nd shot fired that night, was fired from as close as one meter, to one of the paramedic’s— Ashraf Abu Labda’s—position. This is the moment where we hear the last sounds of him, his last voice, his final movements, which really suggests that this is the shot that executed him.
Another key part of our audio analysis was to confirm the witnesses, the survivors, as really the most reliable source of documentation for this event. In every key moment, we could corroborate what they said and how they explained the event, including some very small details that we could hear and pick up. The movements [inaudible] as someone tried to escape, we hear it on the recording. The use of specific weapons that happened much later, two hours later.
So I really want to push that forward while I am with you today is that it took a year’s worth of work for us to really corroborate those testimony, but those survivors have been saying this information all along. So we are trying to get them the audibility with this case. We want them to be heard finally as the most reliable narrators of this event and to amplify their voices.
And we see this time and time again. We also, together with Forensic Architecture, published our joint investigation to the killing of Hind Rajab. Again, Hind says it over and over again—”The tank is next to me. They’re firing at me.” It took our work to show that yes, the tank was 12 meters away. But she’s not a tragic victim of war; She is a witness to the crimes being perpetrated against her. And we’re trying to get Palestinians that audibility by listening so intensely to these crimes.
AMY GOODMAN: Hind is a little five-year-old, six-year-old girl who was killed by an Israeli tank. Her whole family, her aunt and uncle and her cousins, had already been killed in this car and [inaudible] made a documentary The Voice of Hind Rajab that tells her story.
Following an internal military inquiry, the commanding officer—back to the killing of the Palestinian aid workers—of the 14th Brigade received a letter of reprimand for “his overall responsibility for the incident.” And the deputy commander of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion involved in the incident was dismissed from his position due to “his responsibilities as the field commander and for providing an incomplete and inaccurate report during the debrief.” No criminal actions recommended by the inquiry.
Lawrence, finally, as we only have a minute to go, if you can comment on this? And also your being able to figure out some of the names, if only the first names, of the Israeli shooters, the Israeli assassins.
LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN: With the really limited resources we’ve had—two phone calls to the Palestinian Red Crescent headquarters and one recording taken under extreme duress—we have been able to piece together this crime. There is no reason why the Israeli Army with all of its GPS coordinates, its drones in the sky, couldn’t have done this internal investigation at a way higher resolution than we have done. So we expect this is simply an obstruction of justice. It is a flagrant war crime to attack medics and to kill them and execute them from meters away. And so we just do not find it adequate at all, the response to this crime.
AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, director of Earshot, also Samaneh Moafi of Forensic Architecture, assistant director of research, we thank you so much for being with us. We will link to your new report, Israeli Executions of Palestinian Aid Workers and Efforts to Conceal Evidence.
Coming up, we speak to the Committee to Protect Journalists about the torture of Palestinian journalists in Israeli prisons. Stay with us.
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