Bodies of Hospital Patients Found in Mass Graves in Gaza

A growing number of international bodies are demanding an independent probe into mass graves recently discovered at multiple Gaza hospitals that were raided by Israeli troops ― revealing hundreds more Palestinian deaths as Israel’s military offensive in the besieged enclave surpasses 200 days.

Gaza health officials said that Palestinian medics have uncovered more than 300 bodies at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, which Israeli troops occupied until their April 7 withdrawal. The U.N. Human Rights Council said Tuesday that medics found even more bodies in several mass graves on the grounds of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, which was once the territory’s largest medical complex. Israeli forces conducted a two-week siege on the al-Shifa before withdrawing on April 1.

“The harrowing discovery of these mass graves underscores the urgency of ensuring immediate access for human rights investigators, including forensic experts, to the occupied Gaza Strip to ensure that evidence is preserved and to carry out independent and transparent investigations with the aim of guaranteeing accountability for any violations of international law,” senior Amnesty International official Erika Guevara Rosas said in a statement last week .

The Israeli military has claimed that those whom they arrested and killed were militant fighters. But journalists, doctors and other witnesses say most of the victims were civilians or health care workers.  Journalists on the ground in Gaza like Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud said that the bodies being found in the mass graves include women, children, patients and medical staff. Some of the corpses found at Nasser were found naked with their hands bound, according to Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office.

According to Gaza journalist Bisan Owda, some of the bodies found in the mass graves at Nasser did not have organs, skin or heads. Footage from Owda shows a massive number of body bags surrounded by piles of dirt ― presumably from medics continuing to dig out corpses from the graves ― while family members try to identify their loved ones. She shows one of the corpses in a body bag who had a cast on their leg, signaling they were likely a patient at the hospital when they were killed.