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Eliane Lamper
Editor from abroad
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Eliane Lamper
Editor from abroad
Several mass graves were discovered this week at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. At least 300 bodies are buried around the hospital, the Palestinian Civil Defense says. Emergency services are still digging and expect hundreds of bodies to remain underground.
Bodies were said to have been found with their hands and feet tied. There would also be bodies with gunshot wounds, which would indicate that people had been executed. Volker Türk, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, said yesterday that he was “shocked” by the discovery of the mass graves. He called for an international investigation.
Palestinians have gathered at the graves to see if they can find missing relatives in a body bag. There is still much uncertainty about what happened at the hospital. It is almost impossible to conduct forensic investigations in Gaza; Israel keeps its borders closed and refuses to admit research teams.
Palestinians search graves for missing people:
Mass graves with hundreds of bodies found at Nasser hospital in Gaza
The UN has called for an international investigation “given the current climate of freedom”. The European Union also wants an investigation. The Israeli army denies having anything to do with the mass graves or executions, but that claim cannot be verified. The military says it investigated groups to determine if they were hostages.
In January, the large hospital complex was on fire for weeks. According to the army, armed members of Hamas were hiding there, although it did not provide any evidence of this. According to the emergency services, there are also women and elderly people in the graves. It is not clear if hospital staff or patients are also buried.
Evidence disappears
Search teams cannot enter the area, resulting in the loss of a lot of valuable information. “If the allegations made by the emergency services were recorded, it would be strong evidence,” said Soren Blau, head of the forensic anthropology department at the International Commission on Missing Persons. move, potential evidence will disappear.”
In addition, infrastructure and health care have been so destroyed by the Israeli army that the resources to preserve and investigate bodies are not there. “We can also see images and pictures, but this only allows us to speculate on the cause of death,” says Blau. “The longer it takes, the more difficult it becomes.”
Foreign journalists cannot enter the besieged Gaza Strip, but the war is heavily documented by local journalists and citizens. Using this material, an international organization such as Human Rights Watch tries to conduct remote investigations of human rights violations, for example by analyzing photos and satellite images.
Palestinian civilians are targeted
But the distance makes it more difficult to prove war crimes. “There are clear signs that Israel is not only targeting Hamas members, but also targeting Palestinian civilians,” said Sari Bashi, program director at Human Rights Watch. “14,000 children have been killed in this war already, an average of eighty a day.”
The group has extensive experience in investigating mass graves and other war crimes, including in Ukraine and Syria. “We have not been allowed to enter the Gaza Strip since 2016,” said Bashi from Ramallah in the West Bank. “We are working with local forensic experts, but they are on the run and can’t just travel around.”
Israel could also choose to launch its own transparent investigation, Bashi says. “But so far the army has only investigated when Israeli civilians and aid workers with Western passports have been killed. There will be no investigation when Palestinians are killed.”
2024-04-24 18:11:20
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