‘It felt like pulling my heart out of the earth:’ testimonies from the mass grave at Nasser Hospital
As Civil Defense teams continue to unearth hundreds of
bodies from the mass graves discovered at Nasser Hospital, Palestinians are
flocking to the medical complex in search of their missing loved ones.
BY TAREQ S. HAJJAJ APRIL 25, 2024
Bulldozers dig with their steel tongues between layers
of sand and earth. Rescue teams dig into the ground on the other side of the
large yard with simple shovels. Others dig with their hands in search of their
families. The place is crowded.
The Nasser Medical Complex has become a sprawling mass
grave, where the Israeli army buried evidence of a hideous massacre.
At least 13,000 people have been missing in the Gaza
Strip since the war began in October, and people are arriving looking for
missing loved ones. Even if they are found dead, it will at least put an end to
their story.
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.”
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.
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.
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 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.
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.”
Tareq S. Hajjaj
Tareq S. Hajjaj is the Mondoweiss Gaza Correspondent and a member of the
Palestinian Writers Union. Follow him on Twitter at @Tareqshajjaj.
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