Families search for loved ones among hundreds of bodies exhumed from mass grave in Nasser Hospital

Families in search of loved ones who were killed by the Occupation gathered around the Nasser Medical Complex on Sunday, hoping to find their missing bodies in the mass graves at the facility.

“I’m here looking for my son’s body. He's been missing since the Occupation’s first withdrawal,” said the mother of Mohamed Zidan, speaking to Mada Masr.

“I contacted the Red Cross, the civil defense and medical crews. Everyone told me he got shot by the Occupation. When I was speaking with the civil defense, they told me that the Occupation made a mass grave in the Nasser hospital courtyard.”

Civil defense teams started working with bulldozers and other equipment on Friday to remove hundreds of bodies from mass burial sites after they were placed there by the Occupation, within the grounds of southern Gaza’s largest medical facility.

Until now, 150 bodies have been exhumed, Lieutenant Colonel Sameh Hammad from the Palestinian Police’s department of forensic evidence told Mada Masr.

The Israeli military besieged the facility in January, with troops surrounding it and opening fire at civilians and residents of the surrounding neighborhood. The troops ultimately stormed and occupied the complex where thousands of displaced people were taking shelter in February. It withdrew from the area on April 7.

Families returned to the complex slowly over the ensuing weeks. “We received many testimonies from families saying that they had buried their martyrs here, and when they came to retrieve them, they couldn’t find them — the places of burials were changed,” said Major Raed Saqr, from the Gaza civil defense rescue center, who was directing the retrieval of bodies at the facility on Sunday. 

Many bodies were initially buried by their families in graves outside the hospital’s mortuary, according to Hammad. “The Occupation forces collected all these bodies and buried them in one place,” he told Mada Masr, estimating that over 400 bodies were piled on top of one another in the grave. 

Ahmed Ali Abu Sahlul said that he had been looking for two bodies, Mahmoud and Ibtisam Ahmed Abu Sahlul, for over a week now. The family had buried them in a particular place in the medical complex, he told Mada Masr, but when they returned to it after the Occupation’s withdrawal they found their bodies had been removed.

“They are dead, but they didn’t even let them rest in their graves, they tortured them more. They took them out of one place to another, they tortured them,” he said.

“We come every day to look for them, and we can’t find them. Day and night, we look for them. I’m looking and I can’t find them.”

Some were able to identify their family members, said Hammad, explaining that civil defense and families make a tally using “forensic evidence, personal possessions, clothes, anything distinctive.”

Naseera Ahmed was able to find her son this way. He, too, had initially been buried near the mortuary before being moved by the Occupation. Ahmed said that she and her family had dug two meters searching for the body themselves before ultimately finding him in the mass grave.

“People in the past two days were digging with their hands,” said Hammad, noting that civil defense authorities have limited equipment with which to carry out such a major exhumation. “We lack body bags, we make do with kafan. The status of the decomposing bodies require bags. There’s none. There’s no equipment suitable for dealing with the catastrophe at hand.”

Many are yet to find their missing family members. “My heart has been aching for three months, I just want to see my son. What are you waiting for?” said the mother of Zidan, addressing other countries in the region who she said should do more to stop the aggression on Gaza, which has now entered its seventh month.

It is not always possible to identify the bodies, Hammad added, especially those which have been stripped of their clothes. 

Similar mass graves have been found at the Shifa Medical Complex, the largest hospital in the entire strip. Multiple reports and photographs have documented instances in which the Occupation has conducted mass arrests, as well as stripping detainees.

Occupation forces withdrew from positions in the southern part of the Gaza Strip in the first weeks of April, though they maintained a presence along a belt the military constructed separating the coastal enclave in two.

Meanwhile, airstrikes have continued in areas across the strip, including on Nuseirat camp which Israeli forces withdrew from in recent days, as well as on Rafah in the south, where 22 were killed on Sunday, and where over a million displaced people are currently taking shelter after losing their homes.