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Working closely with journalists from Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines, Forensic Architecture collaborated with Earshot to examine the circumstances surrounding the killing of Hind Rajab, her four cousins, her aunt and uncle, and the two paramedics who came to her rescue.
On 29 January 2024, in Gaza City, Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian child, pleaded over the phone for emergency workers to rescue her from a car riddled with bullets. Her body was found two weeks later, on 10 February, alongside the bodies of six of her family members in the car they drove to flee their neighbourhood as Israeli forces invaded. The bodies of two Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) paramedics, missing since the evening of the call when they were dispatched to rescue Hind, were discovered in their ambulance about 50 metres away.
The neighbourhood
In an interview with Fault Lines, Wissam Hamada, the mother of Hind Rajab, explained that Hind and six members of her family left in the early hours of 29 January 2024 from a home in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood of Gaza City, driving north.
At 9:32am, soon after Hind and her family departed the home, an Israeli military spokesperson posted an evacuation order on social media, asking residents of west Gaza City, including the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, to move south. An analysis of satellite imagery (Figure 1) shows that it was not possible for Hind and her family to drive south that morning because the road was blocked by debris from a recently bombed high-rise building.
Wissam witnessed shots being fired at the car from an intersection to the north of the home. Many Israeli military vehicles—their shape and size consistent with that of Israeli Merkava tanks—are visible in satellite images (Figure 2) of the intersection from the day of the attack.
‘We saw them open fire but we thought that maybe those in the car were alive because they slightly turned left, so we said they parked at the station. So we thought they must be safe, and they will go to a safe home, that they’ll go to a safe spot.’ – Wissam Hamada
The civilian vehicle
The bodies of Hind and her six relatives were found inside their vehicle, a Kia Picanto. The state of the vehicle was documented by journalists on the ground following the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the area twelve days after the car was attacked.
A kinetic analysis of the position and state of the vehicle—rotation of the steering wheel, deformation of the tire, proximity of the driver’s side door to a street sign, and shape of the deformation of the bonnet and front bumper—suggests that the vehicle was pushed from the right-side front bumper.
Furthermore, the shape of the depression of the windshield suggests that it was run over by a vehicle such as a bulldozer.
By comparing satellite imagery captured during the twelve days between the attack and the date the evacuation order was lifted, FA was able to map the original position of the Kia Picanto before it was moved. Satellite imagery from 8 February shows the Kia resting on the pavement near a flower bed, where it remained on 10 February. In an image taken on the day of the attack at 3:31pm, the Kia appears parked in front of a gas station.
We used visual evidence to map the bullet marks on the envelope of the vehicle and its interior surfaces. The proximity of the holes to one another helped us identify the volleys of shots fired. The sizes and shapes of the holes helped us to differentiate between entry and exit holes. We mapped a total of 335 bullet holes on the body of the Kia. Most entries were located on the right side of the vehicle, suggesting the position of the shooters.
The killing of Layan Hamada
Around 2:30pm, the first call to Palestine Red Crescent Society dispatchers came from Layan Hamada. At that time, Layan was the only other survivor in the car besides Hind. The Red Crescent later published a 28-second clip from their recording of the call. An excerpt is translated below:
Layan: They are shooting at us. The tank is next to me.
Operator: Are you hiding?
Layan: Yes, in the car. We’re next to the tank.
After a series of audible shots, Layan can be heard screaming until her voice stops abruptly, twenty seconds into the call.
According to an analysis of the recording by Earshot, in the final moments that we hear Layan’s voice, a total of 64 gunshots can be heard, fired in just 6 seconds. The gun firing these shots is firing at a range of 750–900 rounds per minute. This range exceeds that of an AK-type rifle, the assault rifle most commonly attributed to Hamas. This range of rounds per minute is consistent with Israeli army-issued weaponry such as the M4 assault rifle or the FN MAG machine gun on a Merkava tank.
When gunfire is captured by a recording device, there are two distinct sounds that are typically audible. First, the sound of the bullet traveling at supersonic speed. Second, the blast from the muzzle of the gun reaching the recording device at the speed of sound. While the bullet sounds akin to a whip cracking, the muzzle blast is a low-frequency thud. Investigators at Earshot distinguished these two sounds in the recording and used the interval between them to determine the distance between the shooter and the recording device.
Due to the condition of the recording, the noise of the screams, and the rapid succession of bullets impacting the vehicle, it was only possible to distinguish the supersonic sound of the bullet from the muzzle blast for 12 of the 64 shots. The time between bullet impact and muzzle blast ranges from a minimum of 24 milliseconds (shot 29) to a maximum of 40 milliseconds (shot 62).
The spectrographic image shown in Figure 7 (above) reveals the intensity of the frequencies over time for these two gunshots. The X-axis is time, the Y-axis is the frequency range from low to high, and the brightness is the intensity. In the three-dimensional spectrograph of the two gunshots, one can clearly distinguish the signature of the supersonic bullet peaking in the mid-to-high range frequencies from the lower frequencies of the muzzle blast.
Seconds before Layan Hamada is killed, she is heard saying, ‘They are firing at us, the tank is next to me’. The Merkava tank FN MAG machine gun fires 7.62 calibre bullets. These bullets travel at a speed of 840 metres per second. The muzzle blast from the gun that fired these shots was traveling at 340.2 metres per second, which is the speed of sound at the time of the killing at a temperature of 15 degrees Celsius.
Earshot found that with the minimum registered interval of 24 milliseconds, this tank would have to have been positioned just 13 metres away from the car. With the maximum interval of 40 milliseconds, the tank would have still been only 23 metres away from the car. This analysis suggests that the tank had to be positioned within close range (13–23 metres) of the car when it fired the shots that killed Layan. At such proximity, it is not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including children.
Earshot’s audio ballistic analysis supports the final words of Layan Hamada: the gunfire came from a tank that was next to them.