Fifteen members of the Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defense Association were killed.

Not the fighters. Not armed. People do not hide rockets or weapons. They were relief workers. Humanitarian doctors. The paramedics who ran to the injured when the bombs fell. People who gave their lives try to save others.

On March 23 in Rafah in southern Gaza, Israeli forces targeted a convoy of ambulances and emergency cars. Eight Red Crescent employees, six of the Palestinian Civil Defense and one employee from the United Nations, were slaughtered. The Israeli army claimed that vehicles are unlimited and suspected of carrying gunmen.

But this was a lie.

Footaged footage of the RIFAT RADWAN phone, one of the murdered paramedics, shows the flashy red lights, and vehicles with clear signs and there are no weapons on the horizon. Then, heavy Israeli shooting. The corpse of rural devices was later found in a mass grave with 13 others, some of which carry the signs of implementation: lead in the head, chest and hands.

Even in death, they had to prove that they were relief workers.

However, many Western media reported the Israeli version first – “Israel says …”, “Israeli Defense Army countries …”, “a military source tells …”. These lines of formulation carefully carry more weight than the blood -colored uniform in the Red Crescent. More than evidence. More than the truth.

This is not new. This is not an isolated error.

This is a system.

A system in which the Palestinians are assumed guilty. The system in which hospitals must prove that they are hospitals, schools must prove that they are schools and children must prove that they are not human shields. The system in which our existence is treated as a threat – it must be justified and verified or verified – before anyone saddened us.

This is what it seems to ignore humanity.

I was born and brought up in Gaza. I know what the Red Crescent jacket means. This means hope when there is nothing remaining. This means that someone will come to help – not to fight, not to kill but to save. This means that even in the middle of the rubble and death, life is still important for a person.

I also know what it means to lose that. To see the paramedics, they were killed and then stained. To hear the world discuss their innocence while digging their colleagues through collective graves. To see people who tried to save lives to statistics, framed as suspects, then forgot.

Migration of humanity is not just the problem of discourse. It is not just framing the media or political language. He kills. Wipe. The world is allowed to search away while the entire societies are eliminated.

He tells us: Your life does not matter in the same way. Your sadness is not real until we check it. Your death is not tragic until we agree.

This is why the death of these 15 doctors and rescue men are very important. Because their story is not only related to one inch. It relates to the mechanism of doubt that exchanged every time the Palestinians are killed. It comes to how we should become our forensic investigators, our legal team, and our public relations company – during mourning for the dead.

This burden is not placed on anyone else. When Western journalists are killed, they are honored. When Israeli civilians die, their names and faces are filled with screens all over the world. When the Palestinians die, their families must prove that they were not terrorists first.

We are always guilty until it has proven innocent – often, until then.

After the study, the study found that the Western media quotes Israeli sources much more than that of the Palestinian and failed to challenge Israeli data with the same rigor. Not only are Palestinian voices marginalized, but are often framed as unreliable or emotional – as if sadness distorts the truth, as if the pain makes us irrational.

This media style nourishes and reflects political decisions – from arms sales to diplomatic immunity, from silence in international forums to the right of the United Nations. Everything is connected. When the Palestinians are not seen as a complete human being, their killers are not seen as completely responsible.

Emotional losses are enormous. We are not just sad. We defend our sadness. We only bury our death. We are fighting to confess their death. We live with psychological pressure that a society should not bear – the pressure to prove that we are not what the world has already decided that we are.

These are 15 paramedics and the first respondents were heroes. They ran into danger. They served their people. They believed in the sake of life, even in a place where life is constantly under siege. Their memory should be sacred.

Instead, their story has become another battlefield.

The world needs to stop making us prove that we are human. Stop assuming that we are lying and that our killers say the truth. Stop accepting a narration that requires Palestinians to be saints for mourning.

These paramedics deserve to be believed. They deserved to be protected. They deserve justice.

But most of all, they deserve – as we all do – to look at a person.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editorial island.