The five men, fear etched on their faces, lift their hands in the air as they try to walk down a desolate and relatively quiet street in southern Gaza. Plumes of dark smoke billow into the air close by.
A young man holds a makeshift white flag aloft. The small group is trying to reach family members trapped down the street, a middle-aged man says on camera, gesturing with his hands. A gold wedding ring gleams on one of his fingers.
Moments later, shots rip through the buzzing sound of drones and the men duck to take cover. But before they are able to get away, the man with the wedding ring collapses.
The incident filmed in the Al Mawasi neighborhood in Khan Younis, which had been designated a “safe zone” by the Israeli military, unfolds in nine videos obtained and verified by NBC News. It raises more questions about Israeli forces’ treatment of civilians caught in the war that has already claimed 25,000 Palestinian lives, including 10,000 children.
After the gunfire subsides, locals flock to drag the body off the street. A woman screams. Prayers and sobs can be heard as a crowd gathers around the body, and one man furiously tries to revive the dead man.
Gunfire breaks out again and the larger group takes shelter in the courtyard of a nearby university.
Ahmed Hijazi, a Palestinian videographer who witnessed the event and filmed the videos, told NBC News that the bullets came from one of several nearby Israeli tanks.
“The tanks directly fired at him,” he said of the dead man. “One of the bullets went straight into his heart. He was immediately killed,” added Hijazi, who ran back to the group after the shooting, and continued filming.
NBC News cannot confirm Hijazi’s account of who opened fire, but it aligns with a report on the same incident by the British news network ITV News that showed different angles. In a separate video, verified by NBC News and filmed from a building in Al Aqsa University, Israeli tanks are seen lining the road.
Earlier this week, the Israeli military said it had encircled the area, with its troops deepening their ground offensive “to the west” of Khan Younis.
Further videos of the same scene show Hijazi and other displaced Palestinians running to retrieve the mortally wounded man, who is bleeding from his chest.
NBC News provided the Israel Defense Forces with a raw, single-take video of the shooting, its precise location and the time it occurred, and asked if Israeli forces had fired at the men. A spokesperson responded by saying that the IDF was “not aware of this incident,” and that “the video is clearly edited and we have no way to comment.” The spokesperson declined to say whether IDF soldiers were in the area Monday.
Hamas officials did not immediately respond to requests for information and comment on the incident.
Prior to the incident, the group of men had hoped to reunite with the some 50 family members they had been split up from, according to the men’s comments on camera and the eyewitness interview conducted by NBC News. According to the man with the wedding band, his brother and his brother’s children were surrounded by Israeli tanks, and the group of men were returning east in hopes of retrieving them.
“They didn’t bring my brother. We want to go get him out, God willing,” the man says in the video minutes before he is killed.
In the third of the videos filmed just after 3 p.m. Monday, the five men begin to walk along the road towards the smoke. One of them holds a green ID card in addition to the white flag when at least three gunshots are fired, killing the older man.
“We carried him and took him to his wife and his daughter, his family members who were waiting for him,” Hijazi said, referring to people in the crowd. “There was a doctor there, and he performed artificial breathing and pressure so he could see if he still breathed.”
Hijazi identified the man as a member of the Abou Sahloul family and a known apparel merchant in the community. ITV named him as Ramzi. Hijazi described the moment as among the worst things he’s witnessed in the war, which are “hard to forget and comprehend.”
The incident took place just outside the walls of Al-Aqsa University on Al-Bahr Street, a few minutes walk from Al-Khair Hospital, according to geolocation analysis by NBC News and metadata — further information, such as the location, date and time it was shot that is embedded within the video — provided by Hijazi.
Tents and temporary shelters line the road, formerly occupied by some of the hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians who have been chasing relative safety in the southern city of Rafah.
Under the laws of war, also called International Humanitarian Law, parties to an armed conflict must take all feasible measures to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and they may target only combatants. Though civilians have no obligation to do so, waving a white flag is a universally recognized symbol as a further attempt to show that one is unarmed and means no harm.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
