Gaza hospital ‘mass grave’ excavated… What did the Israeli army do in Gaza?

In the chaos of war in the Gaza Strip, many people are looking for loved ones who were last seen or have not been heard from at Nasser Hospital in the south.

Residents say their missing relatives or acquaintances were in the hospital here, but they have lost contact with them since the Israeli occupation.

Excavation work is currently underway on several mass graves in the Nasser Hospital courtyard.

The Palestinian Civil Defense claims that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed hundreds of Palestinians in the southern Khan Yunis area and then transported their bodies to the Nasser Hospital complex.

However, he acknowledged that some graves may have been dug up before that.

The IDF, which entered the Gaza Strip, occupied Nasser Hospital from February 15th to 22nd and March 26th to April 7th of this year.

Palestinian officials said 283 bodies had been exhumed from a mass grave at Nasser Hospital, some with their hands tied. However, it is not clear how those buried here died and when their bodies were buried.

Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called the graves and the destruction of the Nasser Hospital and Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza “appalling.” At the same time, he called for an independent investigation into the bodies found here.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military refuted the claim that they buried the body there as “unfounded.”

It was previously explained that the Israeli hostages who were detained by Hamas and later released were held in the Nasser Hospital for a long period of time.

The BBC Arabic Service spoke to Umm Muhammad Zidane, the mother who came here to retrieve her son’s body.

Zidane explained how devastated he had walked all the way here, holding in his hands a bunch of roses, two bottles of perfume, and eucalyptus oil.

Zidane desperately expressed his desire to find his son’s body, sprinkle flower petals and perfume on it as if a wedding had taken place. Before the war, Zidane had promised to arrange his son’s marriage and throw a nice wedding.

Meanwhile, the BBC Arabic service’s forensics team set out to find evidence to prove what happened at Nasser Hospital.

The fact that there was a body in the Nasser Hospital complex here at the time can also be confirmed in a video dated the 21st of this month. In the video, Palestinian militiamen who discovered the grave are trying to identify the body.

The background in this video matches the background in the video previously posted on January 25th. This video shows Palestinian residents burying about 70 bodies in the yard of Nasser Hospital.

First of all, the buildings seen nearby match the buildings in the video from the 21st.

One eyewitness also told the BBC, “I saw the leg bones buried in the ground, amputated hands and legs, and rotting bodies. “It smelled terrible,” he said, supporting the existence of mass graves.

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defense, said that about 80 bodies were discovered on the first day of inspection at the site, and about 30 of them could be immediately identified due to their distinct characteristics.

He added that identification of the bodies was impossible because they were buried on different dates and decomposed.

Spokesperson Vassal claimed that when the Israeli military raided the hospital, they dug up the graves to find the bodies of Israeli hostages. Afterwards, the Israeli army buried the bodies of those who died during the raid here.

In response, the IDF dismissed the claim in a statement sent to the BBC, saying, “There is no basis for the claim that the IDF buried Palestinian bodies.”

The IDF told the BBC, “In order to find hostages and missing persons, we examined the bodies buried by Palestinians during the IDF operation around the Nasser Hospital,” and added, “After the investigation, the bodies that were determined not to be Israeli hostages were returned to their original places.” explained.

In conclusion, Spokesperson Vassal’s explanation and Israel’s explanation of what happened in the mass grave at Nasser Hospital are consistent. However, that does not exclude the possibility that additional tombs were created when the Israeli army raided the Nasser Hospital.

This mass grave is located in the same area where Palestinian residents have been burying family members and medical staff for the past few months.

Palestinian residents burying the bodies of other civilians can also be seen in another video filmed on January 28. About 30 people were buried.

On February 3, several more bodies were buried 6 meters away from the location in the January 28 video.

In an interview with the BBC, Bassal said Palestinians had buried their relatives and unidentified people at the hospital, claiming they were killed during the “Israeli siege of Khan Younis.”

On January 22, the Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip explained that dozens of casualties occurred west of Khan Younis, and that for safety reasons it had no choice but to bury 40 bodies inside the Nasser Hospital complex rather than outside.

Meanwhile, a released photo shows a partially decomposed body that appears to be tied up. In other words, he may be a person detained by the Israeli military.

In response to questions from the BBC, the Israeli military said, “We carried out the operation in a focused manner (targeting only the target) without harming the hospital building, patients, or medical staff.”

However, three medical staff here testified in an interview with the BBC last month that they were detained after an Israeli raid, humiliated, beaten, baptized with cold water, and forced to kneel for several hours.

The BBC also obtained video taken by a witness inside Nasser Hospital. The video showed Israeli soldiers moving a bed. There were people lying on the bed with their hands tied upwards.

In another video released by the Israeli military, you can see him lying on a hospital bed with his hands tied in a similar way. However, nothing is known about their identity or what happened to them after these videos were filmed.

Ismail al-Tawabta, director of the Media Department in Gaza, claimed that Israeli soldiers stripped and “executed” dozens of patients, displaced people and medical staff.

“We found headless bodies, skinless bodies in the Nasser Hospital complex,” Al-Tawabta said. “Some of their organs had also been stolen,” he said, urging the international community to investigate.

Ahmed Abu Mustafa, a Palestinian doctor working at Nasser Hospital, also mentioned in an interview with the BBC that he had found a body missing limbs. In addition, he explained that one of those bodies could be identified as a hospital medical staff member by the uniform he was wearing. The man was reportedly handcuffed and had part of his face obscured.

Meanwhile, the IDF claimed that it had not committed any such atrocities, but that it detained “about 200 terrorists in the hospital” during the raid on the hospital and that medicines and ammunition that had been sent for Israeli hostages but were not used were found inside the hospital. did.

The BBC showed the obtained videos and photos to Dr. Hassanein Al-Tair of the University of Oxford, England. Dr. Al-Tair, a forensic scientist, explained that the bodies shown in the video are in various stages of decomposition, which shows that the burial times for each body are different.

In addition, Dr. Al-Tair reviewed the videos and images and concluded that the wounds and amputations on the body may have been caused by heavy weapons rather than organ removal.

Dr. Al-Tair said it was common for bodies to break into pieces when a house or car was bombed, adding that parts of the body could also be lost in the rubble.

Meanwhile, a photo of a headless body was circulated on social media with the claim that it was one of the bodies recovered from a recently discovered mass grave.

However, Dr. Al-Tair pointed out that considering the condition of the body and the blood condition, it is highly likely that the photo was taken less than a day after death.

This contradicts the claim that it is the body of someone who was killed before Israel’s withdrawal on April 7.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN OHCHR) noted that efforts are currently being made to verify Palestinian claims that a total of 283 bodies, including 42 identified, were found in the Nasser Hospital complex.

Turk’s representative called for an independent, effective and transparent investigation into these bodies, while also asserting that “given the overall climate of impunity, international investigators should also be involved.”

“Hospitals deserve very special protection under international humanitarian law. And the intentional killing of civilians, detainees, and non-combatants constitutes a war crime.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department also expressed concern about these claims, calling them “unbelievably big problems.”

Additional reporting: Ghahada Nassef