*Among the dismembered bodies, scattered limbs, and decapitated heads are a large number of people searching for family or just there to observe. Some cannot bear it and stand far away, unable to fathom the carnage.
The mass grave at Nasser Hospital is one of dozens left by the Israeli army throughout Gaza. Civil Defense officials believe that many more are yet to be found.
Ayman, 51, his wife Jamila, 44, and their son Abdul Karim, 22, insisted on going to Nasser Medical Complex after the Civil Defense announced that over two hundred bodies had been recovered in one day. The family was there to look for Abdul Karim’s younger brother, who had been missing in Khan Younis for over two months.
Once at the gates to the compound, Jamila could not bear the sight and smell of death, so she stayed outside with her son Abdul Karim, while Ayman went in to inspect the bodies.
“I could not bear to take a single step in there,” Jamila tells Mondoweiss at the door to the complex. “It is a scene that a person cannot bear: a great massacre, a large basin of blood, a pit of bodies buried, cut up.” People continue to arrive at the gravesite at Nasser Hospital in search of missing family members. (Photo: Hassan Selaieh) People continue to arrive at the gravesite at Nasser Hospital in search of missing family members. (Photo: Hassan Selaieh)
The Civil Defense teams at Nasser Hospital say that the mass graves they uncovered here contain more than 400 martyrs. The bodies had been buried with bulldozers, which dismembered some of them. Body parts were mixed together with garbage.
Ayman searches among the scattered pieces of human bodies for his son. Some of the decomposing bodies are already skeletons, so he looks for identifying signs like the clothes his son wore the last time he went out.
“He was wearing the blue wool sweater. I bought it for him. I know everything he wears and can identify him by his clothes,” Ayman says, describing his son as he searches among the bodies pulled out of the sand. “I could recognize him even if he were a skeleton.”
Over the past several days, new families have arrived as people continue flocking to the complex. Every day, Civil Defense teams announce the discovery of dozens of new bodies buried inside and around the complex. Some of the people who arrive come and go multiple times, like Ayman and his family, without learning the fate of their missing child. Others are able to identify their loved ones and take them to their final resting place.
Alaa al-Arabashli, 43, identified his 19-year-old son Moaz’s body at Nasser Hospital. Despite the pain he endured in collecting his son’s body, picking him up from the dirt, and burying him with his own hands, it was an end to the fate of his missing son.
He says that he found his son after the rescue teams were able to recover more than 40 bodies from the gravesite. Civil Defense teams allowed people to check them, and there was nothing that distinguished the bodies except for the clothing. That was enough for him to identify his son.
Some families are summoned to bury their children after relatives recognize them, and they come carrying flowers to transport their bodies to other graves. The bodies are lined up among the people in the hopes that whoever comes will recognize some of them. After they are identified, they are placed in a new plastic bag, covered with a white shroud, and buried again. Palestinian health workers unearth bodies at the mass grave near Nasser Hospital, Khan Younis, April 21, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Palestinians who were able to identify their relatives came carrying flowers to transport their bodies to their final resting place. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Signs of execution of detainees
The Civil Defense teams at the gravesite insist that the Israeli army committed a massacre inside the hospital, which it wanted to hide by digging this mass grave.
Colonel Yamen Abu Suleiman, the Director of Civil Defense in Khan Younis, has been working at the scene over the past four days. He says that he and his colleagues have recovered over 300 bodies so far, confirming that a large number of them showed signs of torture and executions.
Abu Suleiman told Mondoweiss that Israeli forces deliberately carried out indiscriminate killings at Nasser Hospital and tried to hide them in mass graves after collecting them in bags placed on top of each other. Many of the bodies were cut up in pieces, some even torn in half, showing signs of tank treads and bulldozer tracks.
“There was no morality in dealing with the martyrs and the dead,” Abu Suleiman said. Civil Defense teams reported finding bodies with their hands tied at the Nasser Medical Complex. (Photo: Social Media) Civil Defense teams reported finding bodies with their hands tied at the Nasser Medical Complex. (Photo: Social Media)
He also confirms that he recovered bodies with their hands tied with plastic tape, which the Israeli soldiers used to bind their prisoners. Abu Suleiman says they also found martyrs with their eyes and mouths blindfolded.
He points out that the collection of body parts has not yet been completed and that the Ministry of Health will hold a conference in the coming days to reveal further details.
He also asserts that there are dozens of mass graves all over Gaza. “We are still counting and discovering graves in various places based on the presence of bodies in those areas, which leads us to begin searching and excavating in the vicinity until we find mass graves and extract the bodies from them in the dozens,” he tells Mondoweiss.
“So far, four mass graves have been discovered in Nasser Hospital alone,” he continues. “The number of martyrs indicates a massacre, and we found the martyrs with signs of torture, their stomachs and chests opened and their heads smashed.”
The mass graves at the Nasser complex were not the first to be found in Gaza. A few weeks ago, mass graves just like these were discovered in the al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City. Indeed, the number of bodies discovered there exceeds the number that has so far been reported in Khan Younis. To this day, bodies are still being discovered from the Israeli army’s massacre in al-Shifa, which took place during a two-week siege of the hospital. Before that, mass graves were discovered in the Turkish hospital in Jabalia, in northern Gaza.
And now, the Israeli army has withdrawn following the conclusion of its assault on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, leaving behind a similar story. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said the exhumation revealed “the presence of urinary catheters or splints that were still attached to some patients’ bodies.” (Photo: Social Media) The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said the exhumation revealed “the presence of urinary catheters or splints that were still attached to some patients’ bodies.” (Photo: Social Media)
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that it has so far documented a combined total of 140 unmarked graves and mass graves across the Gaza Strip, containing the bodies of thousands of victims since October 7. These graves include documented cases of people who were executed by the occupation before being buried.
“The Civil Defence teams’ discovery of hundreds of bodies from mass graves in the ‘Al-Shifa’ Medical Complex and the ‘Nasser’ Hospital represents a dark chapter in the history of Israeli military violations,” the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said.
The human rights monitor also expressed that the mass graves at al-Shifa and Nasser revealed several bodies with hands bound behind their backs, raising suspicions that the army carried out extrajudicial executions of people it had arrested and detained.
Moreover, the organization asserted that the exhumation process revealed “the presence of urinary catheters or splints that were still attached to some patients’ bodies,” indicating that there were executions of the sick and the injured at the hospital. Palestinian health workers unearth bodies at the mass grave near Nasser Hospital, Khan Younis, April 21, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Palestinian health workers unearth bodies at the mass grave near Nasser Hospital, Khan Younis, April 21, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
Alaa Al-Arabashli, the father who found his son Moaz, said that he could never have imagined that he would be looking for his son in a ditch full of human body parts. Still, he was able to find him and be at peace, knowing that his son was a martyr.
“I collected my son with my own two hands, and I took him to his final resting place,” he told Mondoweiss. “It felt like pulling my heart out of the earth.”
“But I consider myself lucky,” he added. “I found my son. There are thousands of people who don’t know where their loved ones are.”*
Going off topic a bit but what is Palestinian Civil Defense and where has the Ministry of Health gone? I’m seeing Civil Defense pop up quite a bit lately.
A quick Wikipedia search seems like these guys are ran by the PA as some fire-fighting and emergency rescue brigade in the West Bank. But not in Gaza
The organization is responsible for emergency services and rescue in areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
Based on what? With your garbage posts and nonsense based on nothing but your hatred for Palestinians means very few people give a fuck what you have to say.
I think the Nazis were proud of what they did and owned it up.
But I agree that discrediting the discovery of the mass grave in Gaza is going to take more than the rhetoric of ‘bullshit terrorist propaganda’. Israel at this point is leaning too much on people’s sympathy when Hamas did the initial attack.
Israel could let in an independent investigation if they truly believed that this is “propaganda that could easily be debunked.” Hamas has already said they will fully cooperate with it.
It is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance. That claim is even the most poorly demonstrated assumption there is in the world. -- Nietzsche
The nazis also went to Warsaw Ghetto and gave once a dinner to starving Jews and made a movie out of it to prove to their population that they were treated well and were complaining for nothing.
But if you want something specific, you can look on the site below, which starts with denials beginning 1942:
*1942–44 To conceal the evidence of their annihilation of Europe’s Jews, Germans and their collaborators destroy evidence of mass graves at the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers, and at thousands of sites of mass shooting operations throughout German-occupied Poland, the German-occupied Soviet Union, and Serbia, including Babi Yar, in an operation code named Aktion 1005.
1943 In a speech to SS Generals at Poznan, Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader (Reichsführer) of the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons), remarks that the mass murder of the European Jews will be kept secret, never to be recorded.*
1943 In a speech to SS Generals at Poznan, Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader (Reichsführer) of the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons), remarks that the mass murder of the European Jews will be kept secret, never to be recorded.*
Which just shows you the level of intelligence the Nazis were working with.
“Hey, you guys took over Europe and millions of Jews living there just vanished! What happened to them?”
The goal is not to proof that they didn’t do it, or even to make it the rational assumption that they didn’t do it.
The goal is to muddy the water just enough, so some people can subscribe to “it’s complicated” (note how we hear that one a lot these days) or “innocent until proven guilty! And where is the convictions?!” By gaining the information advantage, they effectively demobilize actions towards prevention before or prosecution after. Also it gives just enough wiggle room, so allies can continue to support and opponents struggle to muster definite action.
This game is played expertly by the US, by Russia, by Israel, and China, and used to be played by the Nazis, Pinochet, UDSSR and many more.
It is crucial to collect evidence and it is crucial to never relent demanding investigation and prosecution. Otherwise we’ll get some historians in a hundred years writing a book about everything that happened and everybody will just be like “a well that was ages ago now, wasn’t it?”
The nazi party used a lot of euphemism surrounding their genocide plan and a lot of german citizens claimed afterwards they didn’t know the extent of it (davon haben wir nichts gewusst), but the antisemitism was immediately visible obviously what with the kidnapping. The camps—a bit less so, but a lot of historians feel they were more of an open secret than a secret. It was definitely less globally visible than what’s happening in Palestine though and the international community was justifiably outraged when they saw the extent and brutality of the camps.
I’m going to wait till more comes out. For me, the question becomes, who is more likely to have filled a mass grave with hospital patients? The IDF who were briefly in the hospital and accounted for all the “terrorists” they killed during the raid and let the hospital continue to operate afterwards with no reports of mass executions? Or the Gazans who ran the hospital for months, lacked the supplies to save those injured during the constant attacks, and lacked the infrastructure to properly dispose of bodies?
I’m not saying it couldn’t have been the IDF, we’ve literally seen videos of them running over and burying bodies with a bulldozer. I’m just saying given the context, it looks more like the sad reality of what happens when a hospital has a high amount of casualties and dead bodies brought to it and lacks the resources to properly identify or store them.
They have found many bodies wrapped in plastic, contrary to any normal practice, sometimes with medical devices like catheters still attached. Some people may have been buried alive.
Or the Gazans who ran the hospital for months, lacked the supplies to save those injured during the constant attacks, and lacked the infrastructure to properly dispose of bodies?
That would still make those deaths Israel’s responsibility.
I believe the words of the dozens of doctors and independent aid workers, the footage of atrocities, the long history of atrocities, more than the words of the people killing them (IDF propaganda). It’s not like this is the 1700s and there are no photos or direct evidence.
Israel already proudly said they basically dug up buried bodies and did DNA tests to see if any were hostages. I’m not sure it’s in question that it was a mass grave used by the IDF to discard Palestinian bodies.
Hi, I actually posted an article from Mondoweiss, but it was taken down for “not being a credible source”.
I think if you read the families reactions from there you will be able of answering your own questions.
They quote families looking for disappeared babies for long time, finding them on the bad, and also people tied via their hands on their backs inside bags, eyes blinded.
I don’t believe the population would take people with their hands tied and eyes blinded in such a dehumanizing way and put them inside bags.
I know it goes against rules to atack people instead of ideas, but you’re a horrible person who’s cheering on genocide and someone needs to say that to you. I’d spit on you if I could.
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