Gaza medic killings: How a voice from beyond the grave destroyed Israel’s lie

Mum, forgive me. This is the path I chose. I wanted to help people. Forgive me, mum. I swear, I only took this path to help people.”

These were the final words of Rifaat Radwan, a young Palestinian paramedic in Gaza. He spoke them while bleeding to death by a clearly marked ambulance, encircled by Israeli soldiers, under the cold night sky of Rafah.

He had gone out with his crew to save the wounded. None would return.

The Israeli army opened fire without warning, killing Radwan and 14 other emergency workers. Their bodies were later unearthed from a shallow grave, some with their hands or legs tied, apparently shot at close range.

They were executed, still in uniform, holding their radios, gloves and medical kits.

But footage of Radwan’s final moments showed the ambulances were clearly marked, with lights flashing and medical vests visible. There was no sign of any threat, no crossfire, no ambiguity – only what appears to have been a deliberate massacre.

Erasure of life itself

As the world tried to comprehend the horror in Rafah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood in Hungary, celebrated by one of Europe’s most far-right governments.

Flanked by ultra-nationalists, he declared: “This is important for all of us, for all of civilisation, as we fight this battle against barbarism … I believe we are fighting a similar battle for the future of our common civilisation – our Judeo-Christian civilisation.”

Nothing could more obscenely invert the truth.

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What Israel is waging in Gaza is not war – it is the erasure of life itself. It is the systematic destruction of anything that breathes or dreams.

More than 1,000 health and medical professionals have been killed since October 2023, including dozens from the Palestine Red Crescent Society. Medics have been bombed, shelled and shot while performing lifesaving work.

More than 400 aid workers have been killed in Gaza, including at least 280 Unrwa staff. Hospitals have been obliterated and ambulances torn apart. Doctors have been arrested, tortured, raped, and executed.

Symbols once sacred – the Red Crescent vest, the white coat, surgical scrubs – are now treated as targets

Among them were the medics sent to rescue six-year-old Hind Rajab. She had survived an Israeli attack that killed her entire family. Alone in a car, terrified, she called for help. A rescue team was dispatched but never returned.

Hind’s body was eventually found in a car riddled with bullets. The responding medics lay nearby, executed while trying to save a child.

There are no red lines – not for doctors or children, nor even for the dying.

Palestinian medics say their uniforms don’t protect them; they mark them for death. Symbols once sacred – the Red Crescent vest, the white coat, surgical scrubs – are now treated as targets.

One nurse, mid-surgery, refused to abandon a patient when Israeli soldiers stormed their hospital. They shot him in the knee, shattered the bone, and later dragged him away, according to another doctor’s account. He was tortured, blinded, and eventually dumped on the side of the road in severe condition.

Adnan al-Bursh, Gaza’s leading orthopaedic surgeon, was taken from al-Awda hospital and disappeared into the Israeli prison system, where he was reportedly beaten, raped and left to die.

War of extermination

Netanyahu does not just destroy homes, mosques, churches and schools. He destroys the means to survive. If the bombs don’t kill, then thirst, hunger, or untreated wounds will. And those who try to save others? They are hunted.

In Gaza, medicine is rebellion, and compassion is treason. To heal is to defy extermination.

More than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed, and entire neighbourhoods have been wiped out. More than 1.9 million people have been displaced, with many later bombed in their tents.

Since the so-called ceasefire was broken, the horror has reached new depths. Food is gone, fuel has vanished, and water plants are silent. Gaza’s bakeries have collapsed. Families drink sewage and eat animal feed. They bleed from wounds that no one is left to treat.

This is Israel’s war for “civilisation”.

Jonathan Whittall, acting director of the UN’s humanitarian office in the occupied Palestinian territories, describes it as “a war without limits”. Israel has trampled every line of law, ethics and decency. No zone is safe, no hospital spared, no child immune. This is not a conflict; it is annihilation, unbound.

And the lie that fuels it has been generations in the making. For decades, the image of the “violent Palestinian” has been broadcast to the world – a modern colonial myth. Israel casts itself as a beacon of democracy, a bastion of civility under siege. Tel Aviv built the story, Washington armed it, London printed it, and Hollywood sold it.

But it was never true. It was propaganda – polished, rehearsed and weaponised.

Genocidal policy

In Gaza, the illusion has collapsed. Even within Israel, some are beginning to see this. Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American historian of genocide, visited the country in 2024 and spoke with students returning from military service in Gaza. They were angry, disillusioned, demanding total war. He warned them of the last time a generation of humiliated students embraced militarism: 1930s Nazi Germany.

Bartov also wrote last summer that “it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions”.

Tom Segev, one of Israel’s most respected historians, has noted: “At the age of 80 I’m starting to think that maybe it wasn’t right from the outset, the whole Zionist thing … Zionism is not such a great success story. It also doesn’t provide security to Jews. It’s safer for Jews to live outside Israel.”

This genocide is not accidental, nor is it a tragic byproduct of war. It is policy.

An Israeli officer was recently filmed ordering troops in the Golani Brigade to treat anyone they see in Gaza as a threat, and to kill without hesitation. No need to distinguish between civilian or combatant, child or adult, mother or medic – just shoot. Every Palestinian life is pre-condemned. Guilt is assumed. A pulse is a provocation.

At the same time, Israel’s Supreme Court – praised globally as a liberal institution – has unanimously rejected petitions to lift the blockade on Gaza on humanitarian grounds. Not a single judge questioned the legality of starving a trapped population, including children.

This isn’t just Netanyahu and his fascist ministers. It’s the army, the courts, the state itself. Every pillar is aligned in the machinery of extermination. This is what Zionism has built: a regime that executes medics, buries doctors in mass graves, shoots children, and calls it civilisation.

Bearing witness

But against that darkness stands Rifaat Radwan.

In his final moments, he didn’t speak of vengeance. He turned to his mother and asked for forgiveness. He affirmed the path he chose – not to destroy, but to heal.

Even as his life drained away, Radwan bore witness. Bleeding to death amid a convoy of ambulances, he recorded the massacre. There were no journalists or international observers present. He understood that if he didn’t speak, the truth would die with him. So he spoke.

He knew what came next. Israel would kill, then lie. It would release another media statement to repackage murder as self-defence. He knew the pattern, but he refused to be erased. With his final breaths, he told the truth.

He rose from the grave to speak, so the world could not look away. He rose so no one could ever say ‘we didn’t know’

Radwan was gunned down and tossed in a pit, but his voice rose from the grave. His testimony survived the bullets, his story shattering the lie. He told the world what his killers tried to bury: that even mercy is now a crime. That to save a life in Gaza is to sign your own death warrant.

In doing so, he won. Israel did not get its silence. The mask slipped. The world cannot say “we didn’t know”.

Radwan rose – not only in spirit, but in defiance. He rose above fear, above propaganda, above death itself. In a world numbed by numbers, he restored humanity to the story.

He ran towards fire, towards rubble, towards the wounded. He did not flinch. He chose truth over silence.

And now, Radwan stands as a monument to all Israel tried to crush: a symbol of dignity, the counterweight to cruelty.

His name – from the Arabic root رفع – means to rise. And he did: he rose from the grave to speak, so the world could not look away. He rose so no one could ever say “we didn’t know”.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.