Gaza medic deaths just the latest in Israel’s long history of changing its story over civilian killings
Palestinians in front of a mural of murdered journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Bethlehem, 16 May 2022
Peter Beaumont writes in The Guardian on 8 April 2025:
The Israel Defense Forces’ changing account of its killing of 15 Palestinian medics and civil defence workers is part of a long familiar pattern in high profile cases involving the killing of civilians.
Often, at first, the IDF denies involvement. Sometimes – in the context of Gaza – it suggests one of Hamas’s own rockets fell short, causing the casualties. Otherwise, it might allege that those killed were either combatants themselves, or collateral damage from the targeting of combatants.
And the case of the Gaza medics is only the latest incident when Israel has altered its account of a high profile killing.
The killing of the celebrated Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who worked for Al Jazeera, while covering a protest on the West Bank in 2022, saw a similar shifting of explanations. Initially, then Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett suggested that Akleh “likely” had been killed by Palestinian fire. A day later the government issued a statement where it decried “hasty” accusations of one of its soldiers being behind the killing as being “misleading and irresponsible”. Then, under pressure from witness testimony, the IDF conceded she had been shot by an Israeli soldier, saying then that she was not the target but had been hit by accident.
When evidence emerges to challenge the Israeli military’s account, history shows the IDF then changes its story to suggest the circumstances are not the result of military orders or systemic issues but a “mistake” or – rarely – individual, but not organisational, culpability.