Every day, Mohammad Bahloul gambled with his own life in the hope of saving others. As a medic in the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), he would step into the unknown each workday, never knowing if he would return to his family.
A week before Eid al-Fitr, Mohammad was dispatched to Rafah’s Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood to recover the wounded and dead in the aftermath of Israeli attacks. Shortly after he and a team of medics and first responders arrived on the scene, Israeli ground troops encircled the area and closed off all the roads in and out. As the PRCS lost contact with its team, rumours began to spread across Rafah that those stuck inside would be massacred.
During the attempts of rescue teams to reach the area, UN workers witnessed civilians trying to flee being shot dead. On March 29, they were finally able to reach the area where the PRCS teams were attacked. There, the teams discovered the mangled remains of ambulances and UN and Civil Defence vehicles as well as a single body – that of Muhammad’s colleague, Anwar Alatar.
On March 30, the first day of Eid al-Fitr, they went back and uncovered 14 more bodies buried in the sand in a mass grave. All of them were still dressed in their uniforms and wearing gloves. Among them were Mohammad and his colleagues Mustafa Khafaja, Ezzedine Sha’at, Saleh Moammar, Rifaat Radwan, Ashraf Abu Labda, Mohammad al-Hila, and Raed al-Sharif.
The killing of these paramedics is not an isolated incident. Israel has been systematically targeting medical and rescue workers as part of its genocidal war – a war against life itself in Gaza. Only in Gaza, medical uniforms and ambulances do not offer protection, which international law affords. Only in Gaza, medical uniforms and ambulances can mark people as targets for execution.
For the seven agonising days in which Mohammad’s fate remained unknown, his father Sobhi Bahloul, a former principal at Bir al-Saba’ High School in Rafah, whom I have known for decades, and his mother Najah, prayed for a miracle to save their son.
They imagined that Mohammad had escaped just before the area was sealed, or that he was hiding under the rubble of a house, or perhaps that he was kidnapped by Israeli soldiers but was still alive. As Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, said, Palestinians are suffering from an “incurable malady: hope”.
Although the Bahloul family dared to hope, they also carried within them the dread that Mohammad would never be seen again. They knew the stories. In January 2024, the paramedics sent to rescue six-year-old Hind Rajab who lay in a car, injured and bleeding, beside her slain relatives, were also targeted and murdered. Likewise, in December 2023, the medics dispatched to rescue Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abudaqa, who was bleeding in a street in Khan Younis after being hit by an Israeli drone, were also killed.
For seven long days, hope battled fear. “May God return you and all your colleagues to us safe and sound,” Sobhi wrote on Facebook above a photo of his selfless son.
The family had already suffered so much during the genocide, having lost many loved ones.
