War on Gaza: Footage shows Israeli drone killing four Palestinian civilians

Footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows an Israeli drone tracking and then attacking four young Palestinian men, killing them all in a series of strikes. 

The incident occurred at the beginning of January in the al-Sika area of Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza. 

In the footage, which was filmed by the drone and fed back to the command centre of the Israeli air force, the four men, who appear to be unarmed, are seen walking along a road that had been bulldozed by Israeli armoured vehicles. 

Around them are the scarred remains of buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes and ground operations, which have been ongoing in the Khan Younis area since December.

The drone, which is one of a fleet that has been hovering over Gaza since the war began on 7 October, stalks the four men and then fires on them. The first missile kills two of them, with Al Jazeera reporting that "it was not possible to show the graphic footage after the first drone hit".

After the first missile killed two of the men, one of them appeared to move away from the site of the attack. But the drone returns, targeting the two survivors and killing them both. 

Israel and the United States have both deployed drones over Gaza during the war, either for surveillance purposes or to carry out operations against alleged Hamas targets.

Al Jazeera identified the four Palestinians killed in the January drone attack as civilians, and the footage shows clearly that they are unarmed and simply walking along a destroyed road.

Apart from combat drones, Israel's arsenal of aerial platforms includes warplanes, such as the F16, Apache attack helicopters, and, for the first time in the Palestinian territories, remote-controlled quadcopters have been deployed on a large scale against suspected Palestinian fighters and civilians.