Fifteen members of Palestine Red Crescent Society and Civil Defense were killed.
Not the fighters. Not activists. Not people who hide rockets or weapons. They were humanitarian workers. Humanitarian workers. Doctors who ran to the injured when the bombs fell. People who gave their lives trying to save others.
On March 23 in Rafah, in the south of Gaza, Israeli forces targeted an ambulances and emergency vehicles. Eight employees of the Red Crescent, six of the Palestinian Civil Defense and a member of the United Nations staff were killed. The Israeli army said vehicles were not marked and suspected of transporting activists.
But it was a lie.
Images recovered from the phone of Rifat Radwan, one of the murdered doctors, shows flashing red lamps, clearly marked vehicles and no weapon in sight. Then heavy Israeli shots. The body of Rifat was later found in a serious mass with 13 others, some of which wore the signs of execution: bullets in the head or chest and linked hands.
Even in death, they had to prove that they were humanitarian workers.
And yet, a large part of the Western media first pointed out the version of Israel – “Israel says …”, “the IDF declares …”, “a military source tells …”. These carefully happy lines have more weight than the bloody uniforms of the red croissant. More than proof. More than the truth.
This is not new. It is not an isolated error.
This is a system.
A system in which the Palestinians are presumed guilty. A system in which hospitals must prove that they are hospitals, schools must prove that they are schools and children must prove that they are not human shields. A system in which our existence is treated as a threat – which must be justified, explained, verified – before anyone crying us.
This is what dehumanization looks like.
I was born and I grew up in Gaza. I know what a vest with a red crescent means. It means hope when nothing left. It means someone helps – not to fight, not to kill but to save. This means that even in the middle of rubble and death, life is always important for someone.
And I also know what it means to lose that. To see the killed doctors and then stammered. To hear the world debating their innocence while their colleagues dig through shared pits. To look at the people who tried to save reduced lives to statistics, supervised as suspects, then forgotten.
Dehumanization is not only a rhetorical problem. It is not only a framing of the media or a political language. It kills. He erases. It allows the world to look away while whole communities are destroyed.
It tells us: your life does not matter the same way. Your sorrow is not real before checking it. Your death is not tragic as long as we do not approve it.
This is why the death of these 15 doctors and rescuers is so deep. Because their history does not only concern an atrocity. This is the machine of doubt that kicks whenever the Palestinians are killed. It is a question of knowing how we must become our own medico -legal investigators, our own legal team, our own public relations firm – while crying the dead.
This burden is not placed on anyone else. When Western journalists are killed, they are honored. When Israeli civilians die, their names and their faces fill screens in the world. When the Palestinians die, their families must prove that they were not the terrorists first.
We are always guilty until proven innocent – and often not even.
The study after the study revealed that Western media cite Israeli sources much more than Palestinian sources and fail to question Israeli statements with the same rigor. Palestinian voices are not only marginalized but are also often considered unreliable or emotional – as if sorrow discredits the truth, as if the pain made us irrational.
This media model feeds and reflects political decisions – from arms sales to diplomatic immunity, from silence during international forums to the UN VETOS. Everything is connected. When the Palestinians are not considered to be fully human, their killers are not considered to be fully responsible.
And the emotional toll is immense. We are not only crying; We defend our sorrow. We will not only deny our dead; We are fighting for their death to be recognized. We live with psychological pressure that no community should bear – the pressure to prove that we are not what the world has already decided that we are.
These 15 doctors and first speakers were heroes. They ran towards danger. They served their people. They believed in the sacred character of life, even in a place where life is constantly besieged. Their memory must be sacred.
Instead, their history has become another battlefield.
The world must stop being proven that we are human. Stop assuming that we are leading and that our killers tell the truth. Stop accepting a story that forces Palestinians to be saints to cry.
These doctors deserved to believe. They deserved to be protected. And they deserve justice.
But above all, they deserved – as we all do – to be considered human.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
