“A few minutes afterwards, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops” who “responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles”, it said, adding that several “terrorists” were killed.
The military did not say whether there was fire coming from the vehicles.
“Some of the suspicious vehicles… were ambulances and fire trucks,” the military statement said, citing “an initial inquiry” of the incident.
It condemned “the repeated use” by “terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes”.
The day after the incident, Gaza’s civil defence agency said in a statement that it had not heard from a team of six rescuers from Tal al-Sultan who had been urgently dispatched to respond to deaths and injuries.
On Friday, the agency reported finding the body of the team leader as well as the rescue vehicles, an ambulance and a fire engine, and said a vehicle from the Palestine Red Crescent Society was also “reduced to a pile of scrap metal”.
“The targeted killing of rescue workers, who are protected under international humanitarian law, constitutes a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime,” said Hamas political bureau member Bassem Naim.
Tom Fletcher, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that since March 18, Israeli air strikes have hit “densely populated areas”, with “patients killed in their hospital beds. Ambulances shot at. First responders killed.”
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Saturday that at least 921 people have been killed in the Palestinian territory since Israel resumed its large-scale strikes.
