Search for missing families in Gaza mass graves: ‘We cannot allow this to be trivialized
A mother will go anywhere to find her missing child, and as long as she has life in her body, she will not stop. It doesn’t matter if her child is alive or not. “I kept coming here until I found my Ahmed,” she says. He lost his father when he was 12, and I raised him.’ Other families were also passing by the corners of the graves nearby.
Such scenes are often seen in war-torn areas of the world. On one side, bulldozers are struggling to remove the bodies from the graves. An arm is visible from under the ground. A few people are identifying a new place to bury the exhumed bodies. And the families of the missing are standing in the hope that their loved ones are still out there somewhere.
However, not all these scenes present the same explanation. Every mass grave – whether in Central Africa, the Middle East, or elsewhere – is the result of local conditions. In a war that has so far claimed 34,000 lives on a small piece of land, burying the dead becomes a complex and often dangerous process. Some cemeteries are full. A few are inaccessible due to war. And because of this pressure, many bodies were buried in the grounds of hospitals where the Israeli army says it has fought with Hamas.
In the wars I reported on, it was often possible to tell what happened to the dead. This was because experts reached the scene quickly, and journalists also had access. In the current situation in the Gaza Strip, where both Israel and Egypt have refused to allow international journalists in, and because of the fighting, it is difficult for experts to get anywhere, this is a huge challenge to fix immediately.
On Tuesday, according to another UN official, some bodies were also found with their hands tied. Earlier, a statement from a Palestinian Civil Defense official came out that “Many of the corpses had their hands tied while some were shot in the head and some were wearing uniforms like prisoners.”Reem Zidan had been searching for two weeks for the body of her son Nabil, who was found on Wednesday afternoon.
The Israeli army has said that reports of Palestinian civilians being buried in mass graves are baseless and also claimed that the Israeli military had carried out an operation on reports of the presence of hostages in the same hospital during which Palestinians were killed. “These bodies were carefully examined only at those locations where intelligence indicated the possible presence of hostages, and with respect for the dignity of the dead,” the statement said.
They did not belong to the hostages; they were returned to their place. According to the Israeli army, 200 extremists were detained during the raid on the hospital, while ammunition and unused medicines intended for Israeli hostages were also recovered. She was sitting near the freshly dug grave with her daughter Hind when she told me, ‘My daughter asked to come to her father’s grave, and I used to tell her that we will go as soon as we bury him. Thank God, things are difficult, but maybe after they are buried, we will get some relief.’
