The discovery of the mass grave at Nasser Hospital came two weeks after a similar mass grave was found at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
In a statement this week, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ravina Shamdasani, cited reports that some bodies had been found with their hands “tied and their clothing stripped.”
Those reports, which came from Gaza authorities, could not be independently verified and the group provided no evidence for its claim.
At least one of the bodies exhumed since Sunday was seen wearing a blue medical gown in a video posted on social media by photographer Haseeb Alwazeer. The person seemed to have his hands tied. This body lay next to others exhumed from the common grave in the palm grove.
Doctors at the Gaza hospital and Health Ministry had said that some people who tried to flee Nasser’s compound during the Israeli attack were shot at by Israeli soldiers, and some were killed or wounded.
While that claim could not be independently verified, several videos verified by The Times show gunshot victims lying on the ground just outside the north gate; Others show people using a rope to drag water bottles from across the street to the hospital complex to avoid a road where victims had been shot.
At the time, the Israeli military said it had “opened a safe route” to evacuate civilians from the area, but did not respond to questions about reports that it had fired on Palestinians trying to leave the hospital.
Amnesty International’s senior director of research and advocacy, Erika Guevara Rosas, said human rights investigators and forensic experts needed immediate access to Gaza to ensure evidence from the graves is preserved and ensure accountability for any violations of the international right.
“Without proper investigations to determine how these deaths occurred or what violations may have been committed, we may never uncover the truth of the horrors behind these mass graves,” he said in a statement.
The Israeli army abandoned the Nasser hospital at the end of February and continued operating in Khan Younis before withdrawing from southern Gaza earlier this month. The withdrawal allowed Palestinian emergency services (and their families) to begin searching for the missing.
Jihad al-Bayouk, 26, said he had buried his older brother on Nasser’s grounds on January 24 after he was killed in what he said was an Israeli drone strike on his home in Khan Younis. “I made sure to remember the location so I could come back later and give him a proper burial in a real cemetery,” al-Bayouk, 26, said by phone Wednesday.
He said that when he returned after Israeli forces withdrew from the area, he could not find his brother’s body or the palm trees he used to mark where he was. So he began digging every day, along with a crowd of people searching for the bodies of his loved ones.
“The excavation continued for days” before he found his brother’s body Monday in a different location than where he had buried him, al-Bayouk said. He said two of the three layers of plastic he had wrapped it in were missing and the third was torn off but held in place with plastic clips.