Every day, Mohammad Bahloul has played his own life in the hope of saving others. As a doctor of Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRC), he would enter the unknown every day of work, never knowing if he would return to his family.
A week before Eid al-Fitr, Mohammad was sent to the Tal As-Sultan district of Rafah to recover the injured and the dead following Israeli attacks. Shortly after, he and a team of doctors and first speakers arrived on the scene, the Israeli ground troops surrounded the region and closed all the roads inside and outside. While the PRCs lost contact with his team, rumors began to spread through Rafah that those who are stuck inside would be massacred.
During the attempts of rescue teams to reach the region, UN workers saw civilians trying to run away to death. On March 29, they were finally able to reach the area where the PRCS teams were attacked. There, the teams discovered the mutilated remains of the ambulances and vehicles of the UN defense and the civil defense as well as a single body – that of the colleague of Muhammad, Anwar Alatar.
On March 30, the first day of Eid al-Fitr, they returned and discovered 14 other bodies buried in the sand in a tomb of mass. All were always dressed in their uniforms and wore gloves. Among them were Mohammad and his colleagues Mustafa Khafaja, Ezzédine Sha’at, Saleh Moammar, Rifaat Radwan, Ashraf Abu Labda, Mohammad al-Hila and Raed al-Sharif.
The murder of these paramedical paramedics is not an isolated incident. Israel has systematically targeted medical workers and rescuers within the framework of his genocidal war – a war against life itself in Gaza. It is only in Gaza, medical uniforms and ambulances do not offer protection, which international law offers. It is only in Gaza, medical uniforms and ambulances can mark people as an execution targets.
During the seven bearer days during which Mohammad’s fate remained unknown, his father Sobhi Bahloul, former director of the Lycée de Bir Al-Saba 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 maybe he was kidnapped by Israeli soldiers but was still alive. Like Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, said the Palestinians suffer from “incurable disease: hope”.
Although the Bahloul family dared to hope, they also carried the dread that Mohammad would never be seen again. They knew the stories. In January 2024, paramedical paramedics sent to save Hind Rajab, six, who were in a car, injured and bleeding, alongside his parents killed, were also targeted and murdered. Similarly, in December 2023, the doctors sent to save Tel Aviv Tribune Cameraman Samer Abudaqa, who was bleeding in a street in Khan Younis after being struck by an Israeli drone, were also killed.
For seven long days, Hope fought against fear. “May God send you back, you and all your colleagues, to us safe,” Sobhi wrote on Facebook above a photo of his altruistic son.
The family had already suffered a lot during the genocide, having lost many relatives.
At first, they had to flee their house in eastern Rafah in Al-Mawasi in Khan Younis, looking for an illusion called security.
When the ceasefire was announced, the family returned home in the eastern part of Rafah with thousands of others.
They found their house destroyed but did their best to restore two rooms to the functionality where they could sleep. During this period, children resumed their studies in makeshift tents because so many schools had been destroyed.
Only a week before the disappearance of Mohammad, an air raid flattened the house in front of the family home, and his father’s car was seriously damaged. Again, the family fled, wearing the little left. With each trip, their goods have decreased – an unbearable reminder that when personal effects decrease, dignity too.
But Mohammad did not have time to help his father present another tent of travel. He immediately returned to his duty, working 24 hours a day with his colleagues doctors in Khan Younis, responding to endless calls for help, rushing from a horror to the other. Even during Ramadan, the healthiest 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 little boy.
The sacred month ended with the heartbreaking news of her murder.
On Eid, I tried to reach Sobhi, but there was no answer. On his facebook, I found these words painful: “We mourn our son, Muhammad Sobhi Bahloul, a martyr of humanitarian work and work. For Allah, we belong, and to him, we will come back. ”
Despite the Israeli army’s attempt to hide his crime by burying him in the sand, evidence is talking about what happened. A press release published by the Palestinian Ministry of Health on March 30 said that Israeli forces had carried out an execution and that some victims had been handcuffed and had injuries in the head and chest. The head of the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office in Palestine, Jonathan Whittall, said that paramedical paramedics and the first stakeholders were killed “one by one”.
Israel, of course, used the familiar game book of denial and obscure. He first said that paramedical paramedics were members of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic jihad. He then claimed that his soldiers had shot the ambulances because they “progressed with suspicion towards them”.
Meanwhile, in an act of blatant cynicism, the Israeli government announced that it was sending a 22 rescue mission to Thailand and Myanmar following the deadly earthquake. Ten days earlier, he sent a medical delegation to northern Macedonia. From Asia to Europe, it seems acceptable that a country that has massacred more than 1,000 health workers and the first stakeholders in a territory which it illegally occupies could feign humanitarianism abroad.
The Geneva Conventions, which explicitly protect the medical staff in the conflict zones, were clearly made without meaning in Gaza. International organizations, designed to maintain human rights, continue their performative indignation while not. Western governments continue to be actively accomplices in the genocide by sending weapons and inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
How long will the world look at this genocidal violence in silence? There does not seem to be an end to barbarism and crimes. The executions of these doctors should have been a turning point, a time of calculation. Instead, they still testify to the impunity granted to the Zionist apartheid regime.
That the souls of those who died in the Tal Astlain are resting in peace and that the political leaders of the Western world rest in shame.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
