The U.S. State Department should enforce the Leahy Law, requiring a ban on assistance to Israel Defense Forces's 631st Reconnaissance Battalion 'Sayeret Golani' for the extrajudicial killing of 15 Palestinian Red Crescent Service emergency responders in the Gaza Strip's Tel al-Sultan Refugee Camp and torture of PRCS worker Munthar Abed on March 24, 2025, and for the enforced disappearance of PRCS worker Asaad al-Nassasra.
The 631st Reconnaissance Battalion of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) carried out the extrajudicial killing of 15 Palestinian Red Crescent emergency responders in Gaza, despite clear evidence they were unarmed medical personnel. The unit's soldiers ambushed ambulances, executed medics at close range, and attempted to cover up the massacre, yet Israel has not held anybody criminally accountable.
Background on the 631st Reconnaissance Battalion
The 631st Reconnaissance Battalion ("'Sayeret Golani") is a special forces unit in the IDF's 1st "Golani" Brigade, which is part of the 36th Division, Northern Command of the IDF. The 631st Reconnaissance Battalion is a military unit, which the IDF typically uses for commando and special forces operations, in addition to standard reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.
The Extrajudicial Killing of 15 Palestinian Emergency Responders
According to several media investigations, at 2:00 a.m. on March 24, 2025, the 631st Battalion positioned itself on a route between Tel al-Sultan and al-Mawasi in southern Gaza. According to Haaretz, the IDF ordered the unit to ambush fleeing Hamas militants whom they suspected were residing within the Tel al-Sultan district of Gaza. An hour and a half later, at 3:37 a.m., the deputy commander of the 631st Reconnaissance Battalion reported that he witnessed an ambulance approaching the 631st's dug-in position. According to the IDF investigation, the deputy commander reportedly ordered his soldiers to approach the ambulance, where they shot and killed two Palestinian Red Crescent Service (PRCS) staff members, name and name, and detained and tortured PRCS staff member Munthar Abed, stripped him, tied his hands behind his back, beat him, physically threatened him with a knife to his body, and interrogated him on his alleged ties to Hamas and his role in the October 7th attack. After the soldiers seized the first ambulance, Colonel Tal Alkobi of the 14th Brigade, under whose command the 631st was operating, ordered the unit to return to its initial position.
At 5:06 a.m. later that morning, a convoy of PRCS vehicles traveled through the area near the 631st's position, in between Khan Younis and al-Mawasi. Upon spotting the bodies of the two PRCS workers killed previously, the convoy stopped and medical teams disembarked. The battalion's deputy commander reportedly ordered soldiers from the 631st to open fire with machine guns at the dismounted PRCS workers, while ordering the remainder of the battalion to approach the convoy. Soldiers of the 631st then killed an additional 13 PRCS workers.
Video evidence shows that the PRCS workers were wearing fluorescent yellow vests and that their ambulances were all clearly marked with the logo of the Red Crescent with flashing red emergency lights activated. The IDF buried the bodies—and the ambulances—in a mass grave and did not allow retrieval of the corpses until March 29, one week later.
According to the New York Times, autopsies of the medics revealed that the Sayeret Golani forces shot six of the 15 in the chest or back, and shot an additional four in the head at close range. The soldiers detained one PRCS worker, Asaad al-Nassasra, for 37 days without charge before releasing him back into Gaza on April 29, 2025. Israeli authorities did not provide al-Nassasra's family with information on his whereabouts or his cause for detention, which is an enforced disappearance.
In its initial public statements, the IDF claimed that the first ambulance was a "Hamas police vehicle." The IDF later claimed that the second ambulances carrying what would be the 13 Red Crescent responders were riding without activated emergency lights and in a suspicious manner. When rescue workers and the United Nations finally gained access to the site of the massacre a week later, they proved the IDF's version of events false: video from a cell phone recovered from one of the victims' bodies showed the ambulances' lights were clearly on and flashing. The IDF's own investigation subsequently found that, before the shooting, Israeli military forces alerted the Sayeret Golani soldiers to increased ambulance traffic in the area, and that the ambulances were on a permitted route.
The IDF subsequently provided several versions of events to the effect that Golani soldiers felt threatened by the vehicles, fired from a distance and were unaware that the unarmed victims, which video evidence showed were wearing reflective clothing, were PRCS personnel. Forensic video and audio analysis published by New York Times indicated that the Golani soldiers were shooting from much closer range than the IDF claimed. And according to the IDF, Golani personnel fired at the unarmed PRCS workers for over three minutes, with some reloading their weapons three times, despite PRCS workers' attempts to identify themselves.
Israeli television subsequently broadcast a video of the commander of Sayeret Golani telling his soldiers, prior to their deployment into Gaza several weeks earlier, that "everyone you encounter [in Gaza] is an enemy. Identify a figure – eliminate it."
An investigation by the IDF in April 2025 resulted in the dismissal of the deputy commander of Sayeret Golani, an IDF major, and a reprimand of Colonel Tal Alkobi. However, to date, Israeli authorities have filed no criminal charges against anyone involved in the murderous attack on the medics. After the killings, one member of Sayeret Golani posted a picture of himself in Rafah, at the massacre site, on Facebook with the caption: "Until next time you son of a b****."
The State Department Has Failed to Enforce the Leahy Law Against Israel
The Leahy Law, passed in 1997, prohibits U.S. assistance to foreign security force units credibly implicated in gross human rights violations. Despite extensive documentation of Israeli forces committing gross human rights violations from credible sources, including the State Department's own Annual Human Rights Reports, the State Department has never prohibited a single Israeli unit from receiving assistance.
A federal lawsuit recently filed with the assistance of DAWN seeks to compel the State Department to obey the Leahy Law with respect to Israel. Were the State Department to faithfully and fully enforce the Leahy Law with respect to Israel, the lawsuit asserts, many, if not most Israeli security force units would be found ineligible for U.S. military assistance in light of the vast scale of abuses.
The plaintiffs are Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans who have lost family members or face imminent threats to themselves and their relatives due to Israeli military operations using U.S.-supplied weapons. Their experiences collectively illustrate the extensive harm caused by Israeli military forces receiving U.S. military assistance, in violation of the law.
Victim photos here.
