Gaza’s civil defense agency said it received the bodies of 80 unidentified Palestinians from Israel on Monday, who were buried in a mass grave.
“We found 80 bodies in 15 bags, each bag containing more than four martyrs, and each body was wrapped in a single shroud,” Yemeni civil defence director Abu Suleiman told AFP.
Abu Suleiman said Israeli authorities did not provide any information about the bodies, including their names or where they were found or brought from.
“We don’t know if they are martyrs (killed in Gaza) or prisoners in (Israeli) jails,” he said.
AFP journalists at the scene saw men in hazmat suits examining bodies wrapped in blue plastic sheeting, and then unloading them from shipping containers.
The bodies were then lined up to be buried in a mass grave dug in the sand, while scores of Palestinians watched from the side.
The bodies were later buried in a Turkish cemetery near Khan Younis, the main town in the southern part of Gaza, AFP journalists reported.
A Mother’s Search
“You will ask me why I put all the bodies in a mass grave?” said Tabish Abu Ata of the Turkish cemetery.
“Because I don’t have the capacity to bury each person in a separate grave, there are no stones or tiles,” he said.
Salwa Karraz, a displaced woman from Gaza City in the north, told AFP she had gone to the cemetery to look for her 32-year-old son Marwan, who went missing in January. He left behind an eight-month-old son.
“When we learnt that 80 bodies had been handed over, we rushed there hoping to find him among them,” the 59-year-old told AFP.
“We haven’t learned anything yet,” he lamented.
“We will try to identify him from his clothes. He was wearing brown pants, dark blue shirt, black jacket and beige shoes.”
They last saw him leaving his shelter in Deir el-Balah, in central Gaza, on his bicycle.
In a statement issued on Monday, Hamas said that Israel’s handing over of unidentified bodies “increases the suffering of the families of the martyrs and missing persons, who want to know the fate of their abducted children or to bury their martyrs with dignity.”
The Israeli military had no immediate comment.
In December, Hamas government sources said Israel had returned the bodies of 80 Palestinians killed in Gaza from morgues and graves to check that they did not include any hostages.
The bodies were then buried in Gaza, sources said.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, resulting in the deaths of 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
Hamas militants have taken 251 people hostage, 111 of whom are still held in Gaza, 39 of whom the military says are dead.
At least 39,623 people have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory air and ground campaign in Gaza, according to the health ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza, although the ministry did not give a breakdown of civilian and militant deaths.
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