The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) reported on Monday that when Israeli forces freed four Israeli detainees over the weekend, they did it by breaking into the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza using an aid truck.
The Palestinian section of the Red Cross issued a statement in which it issued a warning “about the danger of the occupation forces using such a vehicle to infiltrate the camp on Saturday.”
“The occupation forces deceived people by disguising themselves under the cover of aid that civilians desperately need amid their suffering from severe food insecurity,” the statement said.
“This endangers the safety of relief teams.”
According to Nebal Farsakh, a PRCS spokesperson, “such a precedent raises the possibility of humanitarian aid workers being perceived with suspicion in the future.”
The Israeli army pointed AFP to a June 8 tweet in which spokesperson Avichay Adraee rejected the claims that IDF infiltrated Nuseirat in aid vehicles as “lies” when questioned about the Red Crescent’s comments on Monday.
Saturday’s military assault in the Nuseirat refugee camp resulted in the liberation of four captives who had been detained in Gaza since October 7.
On October 7, three individuals Almog Meir Jan, 22, Noa Argamani, 26, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41 were abducted from the Nova event.
run by Hamas According to Gaza’s health ministry, during Saturday’s military operation in the Nuseirat camp, at least 274 Palestinians lost their lives and 698 were injured.
The flow of casualties from the rescue effort “has greatly overwhelmed the limited capacities of hospitals” in the area, according to a statement released on Monday by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA.
In the past, Israeli military have often pretended to be civilian charity workers in order to access certain areas.
The army claimed that the three Palestinian militants who were shot dead in January at the Ibn Sina hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin belonged to a “Hamas terrorist cell” after undercover officers, some of whom were disguised as medical professionals, killed them.
After Hamas launched an unprecedented bombardment on Israel on October 7, which killed 1,194 people—mostly civilians—an AFP tally based on Israeli government data revealed that the conflict in Gaza had begun.
During the assault, the militants also kidnapped 251 captives.
After a ceasefire in November that saw the release of over 100 of them, 116 captives are still in Gaza following Saturday’s rescue operation, albeit the army claims 41 of them have died.
The health ministry of the Hamas-run region in Gaza reports that Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 37,124 individuals in Gaza, the majority of whom were civilians.
