Fifteen members of the Palestinian Society Red Medscent and civil defense were killed.
No fighters. No militants. Not people who hide rockets or weapons. They were help workers. Humanitarian Doctors who ran to the injured when bombs fell. People who gave their lives trying to save others.
On March 23 in Rafah, in southern Gaza, Israeli forces went to a convoy of ambulances and emergency vehicles. Eight red crescent staff, six from the Palestinian civil defense and a United Nations personnel member were sacrificed. The Israeli army said the vehicles were not marked and suspected that they were carrying militants.
But that was a lie.
The images recovered from the Rifat Radwan phone, one of the killed doctors, shows intermittent red lights, clearly marked vehicles and without weapons in sight. Then, heavy Israeli shots. Rifat’s body was later found in a dough grave along with 13 others, some of which carried the signs of execution: head bullets and chest and hands tied.
Even in death, they had to prove that they were help workers.
And yet, a large part of the Western media first reported the version of Israel: “Israel says …”, “The FDI states …”, “A military source counts …”. These carefully written lines have more weight than the blood stained uniforms of the average red average. More than evidence. More than the truth.
This is not new. This is not an isolated mistake.
This is a system.
A system in which the Palestinians are presumed guilty. A system in which hospitals must demonstrate that they are hospitals, schools must demonstrate that they are schools and children must demonstrate that they are not human shields. A system in which our existence is treated as a threat, one that must be justified, explain, verify, before someone crys to us.
This is how dehumanization is seen.
I was born and grew in Gaza. I know what a red growing vest means. It means hope when there is nothing left. It means that someone comes to help, not to fight, not to kill but to save. It means that even in the midst of debris and death, life still cares for someone.
And I also know what it means to lose that. To see the murdered doctors and then stained. Listen to the world to discuss your innocence while your colleagues dig through massive tombs. To see people who tried to save lives reduced to statistics, framed as suspicious, then forgotten.
Dehumanization is not just a rhetorical problem. It is not just about the framework of the media or political language. Kill. Delete. It allows the world to look the other way while the entire communities are annihilated.
It tells us: Your life doesn’t matter in the same way. His pain is not real until we verify it. Your death is not tragic until we approve it.
That is why the death of these 15 doctors and rescuers matter so deeply. Because its history is not just an atrocity. It is the machinery of the doubt that comes into play every time the Palestinians are killed. This is how we should become our own forensic researchers, our own legal team, our own public relations firm, while mourning the dead.
This load is not placed on anyone else. When Western journalists are killed, they are honest. When Israeli civilians die, their names and faces fill screens worldwide. When the Palestinians die, their families have to demonstrate that they were not terrorists first.
We are always guilty until it is demonstrated innocent, often not even then.
Study after study has found that Western media cite Israeli sources much more than Palestinians and cannot challenge Israeli statements with the same rigor. Palestinian voices are not only marginalized, but also often are framed as unreliable or emotional, as if pain discredits the truth, as if pain makes us irrational.
This media pattern combines and reflects political decisions, from the sale of weapons to diplomatic immunity, from silence in international forums and vetoes in the UN. Everything is connected. When the Palestinians are not seen as completely human, then their murderers are not seen as totally responsible.
And the emotional cost is immense. We not only cry; We defend our pain. Not only do we bury our dead; We fight to recognize his death. We live with a psychological pressure that no community must bear: the pressure to demonstrate that we are not what the world has already decided that we are.
These 15 doctors and lifeguards were heroes. They ran towards danger. They served their people. They believed in the holiness of life, even in a place where life is constantly under siege. Your memory must be sacred.
Instead, its history became another battlefield.
The world needs to stop demonstrating that we are human. Stop assuming that we lie and that our murderers tell the truth. Stop accepting a narrative that requires the Palestinians to be holy to be crying.
These doctors deserved to be believed. They deserved to be protected. And they deserve justice.
But above all, they deserved, like all of us, to be seen as humans.
The opinions expressed in this article are typical of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
