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  • Treating wounded is never a war crime.

    If a combatant is hors de combat, no longer able to fight, then they are no longer a valid military objective.

    If the IDF shuttles soldiers ready to fight to the front using an ambulance, it’s a war crime. Shuttling injured soldiers from the front to the back is not a war crime.

    Hezbollah and also Palestinian militant groups have been observed to use ambulances to do the former.

  • Specific ambulances are only attacked if there’s intelligence like surveillance that says it’s being used to transport combatants or weapons. If all ambulances were systematically targeted, all ambulances would camouflage as civilian vehicles.

    You are correct that persons hors de combat are protected.

    Evidence in war zones is always difficult, especially when combatants don’t wear uniforms. You can easily make a combatant look like a civilian, by removing the weapons from the scene. Making civilians look like combatants just takes putting a weapon next to their body. Independent neutral investigators will rarely arrive at a scene before one of the belligerent forces.

  • I looked up the event you’re probably referring to. It was in area A, so even if it was a police unit, these should be considered combatants and international conflict. Operating in area A is a breach of the Oslo accords for Israeli forces.

    The squad executing the targeted killing of one militant in the hospital were clothed in different civilian clothes (men, women) as you can see in the video. Only a minority of them wore medical uniforms.

    The article doesn’t say, but I remember reading somewhere that it was a border police operation. The IDF and Israeli police forces have special units that specialize in undercover work and blending in with the Palestinian Arab population.

    One could argue that covert infiltration and targeted killing avoided civilian casualties that would have occurred using a uniformed frontal assault.

    Under IHL these Israeli operatives would be classified as spies and not get protections reserved to prisoners of war.

  • What the IDF actually said:

    In a post on X, the IDF’s Arabic spokesperson threatened that it would target “any vehicle carrying armed men, regardless of its type.”

    Using ambulances to transport active combatants is a war crime and the vehicle loses its protection.