NBC News investigation shows Israel carrying out attacks on what it said were Gaza areas

TEL AVIV – An NBC News investigation into seven deadly airstrikes has found that Palestinians were killed in areas of southern Gaza that the Israeli military had explicitly designated as safe zones.

The attacks took place from January to April, when the Israeli army bombed Rafah from the air and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government signaled its intention to launch a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza’s southernmost city, which has now grown into more than 1 million inhabitants.

Watch more on this story tonight on “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt” at 6:30 PM ET/5:30 PM CT.

NBC News camera crews filmed the bloody aftermath of the six attacks on Rafah itself and one attack further north on the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone, which Israel also declared safe.

The crews collected the GPS coordinates of each attack, all of which hit an area identified by the Israeli military as an evacuation zone on an online interactive map published on December 1. The map has not been updated since, and the Israel Defense Forces told NBC News in a statement Sunday that it was still accurate.

International aid organizations and Gaza residents call the map confusing and difficult to read. Frequent mobile and internet outages since the start of the war would also have made it difficult for civilians to access them.

Sari Bashi, program director of Human Rights Watch, said in an interview that the incidents highlighted in the NBC News investigation are not isolated. “People are fleeing to roads that the government has told them to use, to places where the Israeli government has told them to go. said Bashi, who has followed the humanitarian impact of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. “And if they go there, they’ll be killed.”

On December 18, the IDF dropped leaflets identifying the Tal Al Sultan and Al Zuhur neighborhoods of Rafah, as well as Al Shaboura, home to a large refugee camp, as safe, and told residents to move there. NBC News found that all three locations have since been hit by airstrikes.

Israeli officials have repeatedly said that Hamas uses hostages and civilians as human shields. Netanyahu, along with other Israeli officials, has also said that the Israeli forces are doing their utmost to avoid civilian casualties.

Gaza health officials say more than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza so far during the six-month war, which began after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel that left 1,200 dead and more than 240 people taken hostage. Netanyahu has repeatedly promised to invade Rafah to ensure “the destruction or elimination” of Hamas. This has led to increasing concerns about the safety of civilians who have sought refuge there.

NBC News learned that the Tal Al Sultan neighborhood of Rafah, which was labeled as safe in leaflets distributed by the IDF on December 18, was targeted less than a month later on January 9. Relatives said 15 people were killed in an attack on the Nofal family home. “Many of my cousins ​​were killed,” one of the survivors, Ahmed Younis, told an NBC News crew immediately after the attack. Younis added that he moved to the house believing it was safe “but there is no safe area. The house fell on our heads.”

Just over a month later, on February 12, an attack hit the Al Shaboura refugee camp, which was also listed as a safe zone on an IDF leaflet. An NBC News crew filmed dozens of dead bodies, including some women and children, in the aftermath of the strike, one of several that evening in Rafah.

On April 20, a building in Al Shaboura was also razed by an airstrike. Among the dead was Sabreen Sakani, who was 30 weeks pregnant at the time. Her baby, Sabreen Alrouh Joudeh, was born an orphan after doctors were able to perform a posthumous caesarean section and save her from her mother’s lifeless body.

NBC News cameras captured the moment doctors revived the newborn. Her short life ended Thursday when she died after struggling with breathing problems.

Areas that senior Israeli officials publicly declared safe were also bombed. On November 4, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told a news briefing in Tel Aviv that there would be no attacks on Al-Mawasi, a narrow strip of beachfront land in the city of Khan Younis, promising that “everyone will be in a safe environment will perish.” place” at that location. After January 1, the IDF advised people on X to evacuate to Al-Mawasi eleven times. But Israeli forces repeatedly launched attacks on the area. On January 4, 14 people died, including three children who were killed when their tent was hit by a strike, Palestinian officials said. Footage taken by an NBC News crew less than an hour later showed a large crater.

‘If Al-Mawasi is not safe, where should we go? No one is protecting us,” said Kamal Saleh, who witnessed the attack that killed a total of 14 people.

NBC News sent the IDF the GPS coordinates of the seven attacks it identified in safe zones. The IDF responded in an email that it was “not aware of an attack at the coordinates and times provided” for a March 26 attack in the Tal Al Zuhur neighborhood. It did not respond when asked about the six additional coordinates.

The IDF also accused Hamas of telling people to ignore its directives to move. It said in a follow-up email that it would “act against Hamas wherever it operates, with full commitment to international law, while distinguishing between terrorists and civilians.”

Bashi of Human Rights Watch said the Palestinians have tried to follow Israeli instructions. “People evacuate, people use the roads they were supposed to use, they go to where they were supposed to go and then they get hit by an airstrike or a ground invasion,” she said.

“There is nowhere safe in Gaza,” she added.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

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