On the night of July 18, at about 10.30 p.m., paramedic Muhammad Abu `Umra and an emergency medical volunteer stationed in the town of Dair al-Balah, responded to a call in Maghazi Refugee Camp, a few kilometers to the east, following an IDF incursion which had begun that night. According to an injured fighter whom Human Rights Watch interviewed in a hospital, the incursion involved an undercover advance IDF team, with helicopters providing air cover, followed by tanks. Abu `Umra, the paramedic, said that when he arrived there was heavy exchange of firing in the fields beyond the camp and many drones overhead, which he said he recognized from their sound. Abu `Umra said he waited in an ambulance outside the camp on the Salah al-Din Road for about three hours, unable to respond until the firing eased. At around 1 a.m. on July 19, he drove into the southeast part of the Maghazi camp, where an injured person lay in a street. A crowd of civilians was gathered several hundred meters away, and as he approached he observed no militants or militant activity anywhere close to the injured person, he said. Abu `Umra said he stopped the ambulance with lights flashing about two meters in front of the casualty and got out. “Immediately after we got out of the ambulance, gunfire began and bullets were flying. We withdrew back into the ambulance and reversed to the safe place where the local residents had gathered,” Abu `Umra told Human Rights Watch. He said that the gunfire did not come from the built-up area of the camp but from the open area where local residents had told him Israeli tanks were in position. 
 
Human Rights Watch researchers observed the abandoned Israeli tank positions in the fields south of the camp when they visited the area on July 27. A wall about 2-3m tall runs along the road where the incident took place, separating the built-up areas from fields to the south, where the Israeli tanks were taking up position in the night of July 18-19. Maghazi residents told Human Rights Watch that, throughout the incursion, Israeli forces hardly left their tanks, bulldozers, or armored personnel carriers, and that they never set foot into the camp or drove vehicles into the camp. They were aware of no Israeli target that Palestinian militants might have been shooting at in the vicinity of the ambulance. The sustained shooting does not indicate an accident, but suggests that the shooting targeted the paramedics or another object in their immediate vicinity. Abu `Umra said: “We waited there another two hours, before firing lightened up again. Then we went in and recovered the casualties.”  

Later on the morning of July 19, at around 6 a.m., Abu `Umra responded to another emergency call, after having previously collected wounded persons from Maghazi. On this occasion an Israeli missile or bomb hit a convoy of three ambulances. Abu ‘Amra said: “I saw both helicopters and spy planes [drones] over our head. We were in a street with no clear line of sight to the tanks in the field.” A resident of a nearby house, Hajj Ahmad, told Human Rights Watch that he heard two missiles, which he said impacted five minutes apart. Dozens of local residents said that militants had been hit by the first missile and that the other struck the ambulances shortly thereafter. 
 
Muhammad al-Salihi, an ambulance driver who was also present, said that the second missile directly struck Anwar Abu Huli, a 40-year-old driver and paramedic in one of the other ambulances, as he was assisting a group of injured persons on the ground while al-Salihi had gone toward a neighboring house, where there were also injuries. Human Rights Watch researchers observed the impact holes of the alleged drone missile, one taking out a piece of garden wall in front of a house, which corresponded to those seen at other locations, both in Maghazi and in Gaza City. In several other incidents, paramedics rushed onto the scene immediately following drone missile strikes, whereas they waited in cases where fighting involved shelling or gunfire. Drones employ guided missiles and are capable of precision strikes and, in more than half a dozen half a dozen strikes Human Rights Watch researched, fired only one missile in a given incident. Artillery shelling, on the other hand, often lasted longer and typically involved several shells. 
 
Abu `Umra continued: “In this incident a missile had hit on the corner of the street. We were in three ambulances, because there were a lot of injured after the first strike. The first [ambulance] stopped approximately 10 meters from the incident. We were in the second ambulance with two other paramedics when a missile struck. I was in the [ambulance] at the time and was injured in the hand.” Anwar Abu Huli had already got out to help the injured. Abu Huli was hit by shrapnel in his right leg and upper body. “His leg was completely gone, maybe hanging on by a piece of skin,” one of the paramedics at the scene told Human Rights Watch. Abu Huli was later transferred to the Ikhilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. 
 
In an incident on July 20, Ala’ al-Susi, a paramedic, together with ambulance driver Hanadi al-Masri, responded to a reported injury from an attack on a car along the Sea Road, south of Gaza City. He said he saw an Israeli gunboat off shore, and believed it had struck the car. When he approached the scene around 12.30 p.m., al-Susi said, he saw that another ambulance from the town of Dair al-Balah, several kilometers to the south, had already responded. Al-Susi said he turned around to head back. Approximately 100 meters from where he turned around, a projectile launched from the direction of the Israeli gunboat to the west hit the rear of his ambulance on the left side, shattering the rear glass. Al-Susi said that his ambulance was the only vehicle moving on the road at the time, and that the other ambulance and the car which had been hit previously were the only other vehicles on the road. No one else was in the area, he said. His ambulance still functioned, he said, so he continued back to Gaza City. 
 
In a second incident on July 20, Muhammad al-Salihi, an ambulance driver, and Muhammad al-`Uzaiza, a paramedic, responded at 7.20 p.m. to a call from the southern edge of Maghazi Refugee Camp. It was still light at that time, he said, but they had their lights flashing. An ambulance driver some 30-50 meters in front of them told al-Salihi to follow, as there was no sign of fighting and he considered it safe to proceed. They came to a place about 200 meters from the scene of an earlier strike by a drone-fired bomb. Al-Salihi and al-`Uzaiza both told Human Rights Watch that they did not observe any fighting or armed Palestinians in the vicinity. At that point what al-Salihi described as a missile struck a residential building several storeys high immediately to their left, in between the two ambulances, causing a concrete pillar on the roof to collapse. Al-Salihi said that they were wearing bullet-proof vests, but that shrapnel came through the driver’s window and hit him in the left shoulder, coming through the driver’s window. The paramedic in the passenger seat, al-‘Azaiza, was lightly injured in the hand. Al-Salihi said that the street was too narrow to turn around, so he reversed until he got to a safer area. An impartial investigation into this case is needed to determine why the IDF failed to take precautions to avoid endangering the clearly marked ambulance, even if the building was a legitimate target. 

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