A/HRC/12/48 page 175 reviewed several sworn statements they and other eyewitnesses gave to NGOs about the incident and found them to be consistent with the account it received. 778. The Mission notes that, in general, Izbat Abd Rabbo and the nearby areas of Jabal al-Kashef and Jabal al-Rayes appear to have been among the locations in Gaza which saw the most intense combat during the military operations.430 The testimony of Khalid and Kawthar Abd Rabbo, however, shows that the Israeli armed forces were not engaged in combat or fearing an attack at the time of the incident. Two soldiers were sitting on the tank in front of the Abd Rabbo family house and having a snack. They clearly did not perceive any danger from the house, its occupants or the surroundings. Moreover, when the family, consisting of a man, a young and an elderly woman, and three small girls, some of them waving white flags, stepped out of the house, they stood still for several minutes waiting for instructions from the soldiers. The Israeli soldiers could, therefore, not reasonably have perceived any threat from the group. Indeed, the fact that the gunfire was directed at the three girls and, subsequently, at the elderly woman, and not at the young adult couple, can be seen as further corroborating the finding that there was no reasonable ground for the soldier shooting to assume that any of the members of the group were directly participating in the hostilities. The Mission finds that the soldier deliberately directed lethal fire at Souad, Samar and Amal Abd Rabbo and at their grandmother, Hajja Souad Abd Rabbo. 779. The Mission further finds that, by preventing Sameeh al-Sheikh from taking the wounded to the nearest hospital in his ambulance, the Israeli armed forces deliberately further aggravated the consequences of the shooting. The Mission recalls that the soldiers had forced Sameeh alSheikh and his son to get out of the ambulance, undress and then re-dress. They therefore knew that they did not constitute a threat. Instead of allowing them to take the gravely wounded Samar Abd Rabbo to hospital, the soldiers forced Sameeh al-Sheikh and his son to abandon the ambulance and to walk towards Jabaliyah. 11. The shooting of Rouhiyah al-Najjar 780. The Mission visited the site of the shooting of Rouhiyah al-Najjar in Khuza’a. It interviewed two eyewitnesses of the shooting and six other witnesses to the events, including Yasmine al-Najjar, Nasser al-Najjar, Rouhiyah al-Najjar’s husband, and their daughter Hiba. 781. The Israeli armed forces launched the attack against Khuza’a, a small town about half a kilometre from the border (Green Line) with Israel east of Khan Yunis, around 10 p.m. on 12 January 2009. During the night, they used white phosphorous munitions, causing fires to break out in the al-Najjar neighbourhood on the eastern fringe of Khuza’a. Families in the neighbourhood, including the family of Nasser al-Najjar, his first wife Rouhiyah and their daughter Hiba, spent much of the night trying to extinguish fires in their houses. Israeli armed forces, possibly heliborne troops, had taken position on the roofs of some houses in the neighbourhood and observed the residents as they attempted to fight the fires. Around 3 a.m. residents also began to hear the noise of approaching tanks and bulldozers, with which they were well familiar, as in 2008 there had been several Israeli incursions into the farmland to the north “The hidden dimension of Palestinian war casualties…” suggests that these areas were among those in which Palestinian combatants most frequently engaged the Israeli armed forces. 430