The discovery of the mass grave at Nasser Hospital came two weeks after a similar mass grave was discovered at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
In a statement this week, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ravina Shamdasani quoted reports that some bodies were found with their hands “tied and undressed”.
This information, emanating from Gaza authorities, could not be independently verified and the group has not provided any evidence for its claims.
At least one of the bodies exhumed since Sunday was seen wearing a blue medical coat in a video published on social networks by a photographer, Haseeb Alwazeer. The person appeared to have their hands tied. This body lay next to others exhumed from the mass grave of the palm grove.
Hospital doctors and the Gaza Health Ministry said some people who tried to flee the Nasser compound during the Israeli raid were shot dead by Israeli soldierssome being killed or injured.
Although this claim could not be independently verified, several videos verified by The Times show gunshot victims lying on the ground just outside the north gate; others to show people used a rope to pull water bottles across the street to the hospital complex to avoid a road where victims had been shot.
At the time, the Israeli military said it had “opened a safe route” to evacuate civilians from the area, but did not respond to questions about reports that it had fired on Palestinians who tried to leave the area. ‘hospital.
Erika Guevara Rosas, senior director of research and advocacy at Amnesty International, said human rights investigators and forensic experts needed immediate access to Gaza to ensure evidence from graves was preserved and accountability be established for any violation of international law.
“Without proper investigations to determine how these deaths occurred or what violations may have been committed, we may never uncover the truth about the horrors behind these mass graves,” she said in a statement. statement.
The Israeli army left the Nasser hospital at the end of February and continued its operations in Khan Younis before withdrawing from southern Gaza earlier this month. The withdrawal allowed Palestinian emergency services – and family members – to begin searching for the missing.
Jihad al-Bayouk, 26, said he buried his older brother on Nasser’s grounds on January 24 after he was killed in what he said was an Israeli drone strike on their home in Khan Younis. “I made sure to remember the place so that I could come back later and give him a proper burial in a real cemetery,” Mr. al-Bayouk, 26, said by telephone on Wednesday.
He said that when he returned after Israeli forces withdrew from the area, he could not find his brother’s body or the palm trees he had used to mark his location. So he began digging every day, along with a crowd of other people, looking for the bodies of their loved ones.
“The search lasted for days” before he found his brother’s body on Monday in a different location from where he had buried it, Mr. al-Bayouk said. He said two of the three layers of plastic he had wrapped it with were missing and the third had been torn off but held together with plastic clips.
