Some of the 15 paramedics who were killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces in Rafah had their hands and legs tied before being buried in a mass grave, two eyewitnesses reported on Wednesday.

In the early hours of March 23, Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance crews and Civil Defense rescue workers were dispatched to al-Hashashin in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, to respond to an airstrike, before Gazan Civil Defense lost contact with them.

“I was able to see three bodies when they were transferred to the Nasser hospital. They had bullets in their chest and head. They were executed. They had their hands tied,’’ Dr. Ahmed al-Farra said, adding, “They tied them so they were unable to move and then they killed them.”

Al-Farra is a senior doctor at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. He saw the remains of some of the paramedics as they arrived to the medical facility.

He shared photographs which he took upon the arrival of one of the deceased at the hospital, showing a hand emerging from the sleeve of a long black shirt with a black cord tightly knotted around the wrist, The Guardian reported.

An official from an international aid agency, who participated in recovering remains from Rafah on Sunday, described seeing evidence that one of the deceased had been shot after being detained.

“I saw the bodies with my own eyes when we found them in the mass grave,” the witness, who preferred to remain anonymous, told The Guardian, noting, “They had signs of multiple shots in the chest. One of them had legs tied. One was shot in the head. They were executed.”

Dr. Bashar Murad, the Red Crescent’s director of health programs in Gaza, stated that at least one of the recovered paramedics had been found with his hands tied and that one had been on a call with the ambulance dispatcher when the attack occurred.

“The gunshots were fired from a close distance. They could be heard on the call between the signal officer and of the medical crews that survived and phoned the ambulance centre for help. The soldiers’ voices were clearly audible in Hebrew and very close, as well as the sound of the gunfire," Murad told The Guardian.

He added that the dispatcher heard one of the Israeli troops saying, “Gather them at the wall and bring some restraints to tie them.”

Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza, stated that the bodies were found with around 20 gunshot wounds each and confirmed that at least one had their legs bound.

Believed to have been killed on March 23, two of the victims lost their lives in the early hours when their ambulance, en route to retrieve injured people from an earlier airstrike, came under Israeli fire.

The remaining 13 were part of a convoy of ambulances and Civil Defense vehicles sent to recover the bodies of their two colleagues, including a UN employee, with Red Crescent paramedic Assad al-Nassasra still missing.

The UN reported that ambulances and other vehicles, along with the bodies of the dead, were buried in sand by bulldozers in what seemed to be an attempt to conceal the killings, with video footage captured by the recovery team revealing a crushed UN vehicle, ambulances, and a fire truck, all flattened and buried in the sand by the Israeli military.

'Israel' admits to shooting at Gaza ambulances

The Israeli Occupation Army admitted on March 29 that it had opened fire on ambulances in the Gaza Strip, claiming the medical vehicles were "suspicious."

The incident occurred in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah, a southern city near the Egyptian border, where the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) stated that their troops "opened fire on Hamas vehicles, killing several Hamas militants."

“A few minutes afterward, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops…The troops responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles, eliminating a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists," the Israeli army claimed without clarifying if any shots were fired from the vehicles.

It stated that after a preliminary investigation, it found that some of the suspicious vehicles were ambulances and fire trucks, condemning what it alleged to be the repeated misuse of ambulances "by terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip for terrorist purposes."