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- Reporters, Sherin Youssef and Adnan El-Bershe
- Correspondent, BBC Arabic Service
-
8 hours ago
In the chaos of war in the Gaza Strip, many people are searching for loved ones last seen or not heard from at Nasser Hospital in the south.
Residents say that their missing relatives or acquaintances are 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 courtyard of Nasser Hospital.
The Palestinian Civil Defense claims that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed hundreds of Palestinians in the southern area of Khan Yunis and then transported their bodies to the Nasser Hospital complex.
However, he acknowledged that some graves may have been dug before that.
The IDF, which entered the Gaza Strip, occupied Nasser Hospital between February 15 and 22 and March 26 and April 7 this year.
Image copyright: @dr.ameera_alsouli / Instagram
Photo caption A scene from a video posted on Instagram on February 15. The video, whose authenticity was confirmed by BBC Arabic News, shows a tank entering the Nasser Hospital complex.
exhumation of a body
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 destruction of Nasser Hospital and Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza “outrageous.” At the same time, he called for an independent investigation into the body found here.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army refuted the claim that they buried the body there as “baseless.”
It was previously explained that the Israeli hostages who were held by Hamas and later released were kept in Nasser Hospital for a long time.
The BBC Arabic Service spoke to Umm Muhammad Zidane, the mother who came here to retrieve her son’s body.
Sidan explained how boring 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, sprinkled flower petals and perfume on it as if a wedding had taken place. Before the war, Zidane had promised to arrange his son’s wedding 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.
Proof of the existence of mass graves
The fact that a body was 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 militants who discovered the grave try to identify the body.
Video description: Bodies exhumed from the Nasser Hospital complex in the southern Gaza Strip
location of mass graves
The background of this video matches the background of the video previously posted on January 25. This video shows Palestinian residents burying around 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 leg bones buried in the ground, hands and legs cut off, and bodies rotting. “It smelled terrible,” he said, supporting the existence of mass graves.
Did Israel dig a mass grave?
Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defence, said that around 80 bodies were discovered on the first day of the inspection at the site, and that around 30 of them could be immediately identified due to their unique characteristics.
He added that it was impossible to identify the bodies because they were buried on different dates and decomposed.
Spokesman Vassal claimed that the Israeli army raided the hospital, that they dug up the graves to find the bodies of the Israeli hostages. Afterwards, the Israeli army buried the bodies of those who died during this raid.
In response, the IDF rejected 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 people, we examined the bodies buried by Palestinians during the IDF operation around Nasser Hospital,” and added, “After the investigation, the bodies found were not Israelites. hostages were returned to their original places.” he explained.
In conclusion, Speaker Vassal’s explanation and Israel’s explanation of what happened in the mass grave at Nasser Hospital are consistent. However, this does not rule out the possibility that additional graves were created when the Israeli army raided Nasser Hospital.
What does the evidence tell us?
This mass grave is located in the same area where Palestinian residents have been burying family members and medical staff over the past months.
Palestinian residents burying the bodies of other civilians can also be seen in another video filmed on January 28. Around 30 people were buried.
On February 3, several more bodies were buried 6 meters away from the scene in the January 28 video.
In an interview with the BBC, Bassal said that Palestinians buried their relatives and unknown people in the hospital, claiming that they were killed during “Israel’s siege of Khan Younis.”
On January 22, the Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip explained that dozens of casualties had occurred west of Khan Younis, and that for security reasons it had no choice but to bury 40 bodies inside the Nasser Hospital complex rather than outside.
Image caption: Images confirmed by the BBC show men arrested after the attack on the Nasser Hospital in Israel.
Is there any evidence that the Israeli army mistreated prisoners?
Meanwhile, a photo released shows a partially decomposed body that appears to have been tied up. In other words, he can be a person detained by the Israeli army.
In response to questions from the BBC, the Israeli army 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 members of 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 some hours.
The BBC also obtained a video taken by a witness at Nasser Hospital. The video showed Israeli soldiers moving a bed. There were people lying on the bed with their hands tied up.
In another video released by the Israeli army, you can see him lying on a hospital bed with his hands tied in a similar way. However, nothing is known about their identities or what happened to them after these videos were filmed.
Photo caption, video posted on December 24th last year. In the video seen by the BBC, people in the Gaza Strip are sitting with their eyes covered and their hands tied behind their backs.
Some of the missing remains
Ismail al-Tawabta, director of the Media Department in Gaza, claimed that Israeli soldiers removed and “executed” dozens of patients, displaced people and medical staff.
“We found bodies without heads, bodies without skin in the Nasser Hospital complex,” Al-Tawabta said. “Some of their organs had also been stolen,” he said, calling for an investigation by the international community.
Ahmed Abu Mustafa, a Palestinian doctor who works at Nasser Hospital, also mentioned in an interview with the BBC that he had found a body missing his legs. In addition, he explained that one of those bodies could be identified as a member of the medical staff of a hospital by the uniform he was wearing. It is said that the man was handcuffed and part of his face was covered.
Meanwhile, the IDF claimed that it had committed no such atrocities, but that it had detained “about 200 terrorists in the hospital” during the raid on the hospital and that medicine and ammunition sent for the Israeli hostages but that they were not used were discovered. inside the hospital.
The BBC showed the videos and pictures obtained to Dr. Hassanein Al-Tair from the University of Oxford, England. Dr Al-Tair, a forensic scientist, explained that the bodies shown in the video are in different stages of decomposition, which shows that the burial times of each body are different.
In addition, Dr Al-Tair reviewed the videos and images and concluded that the wounds and amputations on the body could have been caused by heavy weapons rather than the removal of organs.
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.
a headless body
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 noted that given the condition of the body and the condition of the blood, it was very likely that the photo was taken less than a day after death.
This contradicts the claim that this is the body of someone who was killed before Israel withdrew on April 7.
Photo caption: An excavator was used to excavate at Nasser Hospital.
action by the United Nations
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations 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, have been found in the Nasser Hospital complex.
Turk’s representative called for an independent, effective and transparent investigation into these bodies, while also claiming that “given the general climate of impunity, international investigators should also be part of the process.”
“Hospitals deserve very special protection under international humanitarian law. And the deliberate killing of civilians, prisoners and non-combatants is a war crime. “
Meanwhile, the US State Department also expressed concern about these allegations, calling them “incredibly big problems.”
Additional reporting: Ghahada Nassef
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