Gaza’s Civil Defence agency said it received the bodies of 80 unidentified Palestinians from Israel on Monday, which it buried in a mass grave. Civil Defence director Yamen Abu Suleiman told Agence France-Presse (AFP):
We received 80 bodies inside 15 bags, with more than four martyrs in each bag, each wrapped in a single shroud.
Abu Suleiman said Israeli authorities did not provide any information about the bodies, including their names or where they were found or taken from. He added:
We do not know if they are martyrs (killed in Gaza) or prisoners from (Israel’s) jails…This is a war crime, a crime against humanity.
Al Jazeera reported earlier this year:
about 9,500 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank were in Israeli captivity, according to estimates from Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a rights group based in the West Bank city of Ramallah that supports Palestinian prisoners.
AFP journalists on the scene saw men in hazmat suits inspecting the corpses wrapped in blue plastic sheeting, before unloading them from the shipping container they had arrived in.
The bodies were then laid in a line for burial in a mass grave dug in the sand, with scores of Palestinians watching from the side.
They were later buried at the Turkish cemetery, near Khan Yunis, the main city in the southern part of Gaza.
A mother’s search
Onlookers were stricken with grief that has become commonplace in Palestine. one person, Tabesh Abu Ata from the Turkish cemetery said:
You will ask me the reason why I put all the bodies in a mass grave?
Because I have no capabilities to bury each one in an individual grave, (there are no) stones or tiles [for that].
Salwa Karaz, a displaced woman from Gaza City in the north, told AFP that she had gone to the cemetery hoping to find her 32-year-old son Marwan, who went missing in January. He left behind an eight-month-old son. She told AFP:
When we learned that 80 bodies had been handed over, we came to search in hopes of finding him among them.
As of now, we have not learned anything.
We will try to identify him through his clothes. He was wearing brown pants, a navy blue shirt, a black jacket, and beige boots.
She last saw him leaving on his bicycle from their shelter in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza.
Exacerbated suffering
In a statement released Monday, Hamas said Israel’s delivery of bodies without identities:
exacerbates the suffering of the families of martyrs and the missing, who seek to know the fate of their abducted children or to bury their martyrs in a dignified manner.
In December, Hamas government sources said Israel returned the bodies of 80 Palestinians killed in Gaza after taking them from morgues and graves to check there were no hostages among them. The bodies were then buried in Gaza, the sources added.
The Quds News Network detailed the disrespect and inhumanity shown to Palestinians:
Breaking | Media coverage: The Gaza Government Media Office reports that the Israeli army violated the corpses of 80 Palestinians, delivering them mutilated with stolen organs. The Israeli army also refuses to disclose their names and the locations from which their bodies were… pic.twitter.com/iQo38KCJ9x
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) December 26, 2023
Journalist Samira Mohyeddin asked:
How many mass graves make a genocide?
Heartbreakingly, In Context Media showed that all this is nothing new:
Israel has stolen 2,000 Palestinian bodies from Gaza cemeteries since October 7.
Gaza’s Government Media Office reports that although the IDF returned some of the corpses, they "desecrate[d] the dignity of the bodies of 89 martyrs, handing them over as skeletons and decomposed… pic.twitter.com/mY5lVR4n0r
— In Context (@incontextmedia) August 6, 2024
Unfathomable
It should be unfathomable that Israel kills enough Palestinians to warrant mass graves. Not only that, it doesn’t allow for safe identification of bodies for a death toll, many remained trapped under rubble, and now the rotting, decomposing corpses of Palestinians are dumped as though they weren’t humans, but debris.
The fact remains that if even one white Western person had experienced such treatment, everybody would be up in arms. And, rightly so – this happening to even one person is enough to spark grief, outrage, and horror at the despicable treatment of a person.
But, when it comes to Palestinians, the world doesn’t bat an eyelid as tens of corpses are dumped all at once, without ceremony. The fact Palestinians have to endure this as a regular event is unconscionable. And yet, it will happen again, undoubtedly.
