Several mass graves have been found at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, in recent days. According to employees of the Palestinian Civil Defense (PCD) in Gaza, there are more than three hundred bodies, including women and the elderly.
Employees of the organization told news channel CNN that some bodies have had their hands tied and there are indications of executions. “We don’t know if they were buried alive or executed. Most of the bodies have been decomposed,” Yamen Abu Suleiman, the director of Civil Defense in Khan Younis, told CNN.
Siege
At the end of January, the Israeli army besieged the Nasser hospital for weeks. It also carried out air raids in the vicinity of the hospital. According to the Israeli army, Hamas fighters may have been in the hospital. It has provided no evidence for this.
The Israeli army largely withdrew from southern Gaza on April 7. Since then, residents have returned to Nasser Hospital to search for slain relatives and bury them permanently elsewhere.
Some of them told CNN that they had initially temporarily buried their relatives on the site themselves. The bodies were later reportedly exhumed by the Israeli army, which carried out DNA tests to see if they contained the bodies of Israeli hostages.
The Israeli army denied in a statement on Tuesday that its forces have executed or buried Palestinians in mass graves at hospitals in Gaza.
It is not yet clear whether there are hospital employees or patients among the dead. According to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, these are civilians who were killed during the Israeli siege and collectively buried by the army. It also reported that children were among the dead.
Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a response on Tuesday that he was “shocked” by the discovery of the mass graves at the hospitals.
Excavated with shovels
The Nasser Hospital is not the first medical facility in Gaza where mass graves have been found. Earlier this month, dozens of bodies were exhumed from a mass grave at al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza City, which was besieged in March. Among them were also women and children. Due to a lack of forensic experts and resources, bodies were dug out with shovels and by hands. In early February, a mass grave of thirty Palestinian prisoners, who were blindfolded and with their hands bound, was also discovered in northern Gaza.
The death toll in Gaza has risen to more than 34,000 since the start of the Israeli offensive. Thousands of people are still buried under the rubble or missing. Israeli airstrikes have intensified in recent days in several parts of the Gaza Strip, including the north.
According to residents of Khan Younis, the army again invaded an eastern part of the city on Monday, forcing people who had returned to their homes to flee again.
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