Yet another Israeli war crime is buried in the sand as the world looks away

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.

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.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.