New Bodies Exhumed From Al-Shifa Hospital Mass Graves

In northern Gaza, health workers managed to exhume the first bodies from new mass graves in and around the destroyed Al-Shifa hospital.

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Palestinian media at the time denounced the murders perpetrated inside the medical complex by occupying forces, which left many of the bodies rotting in the sun during the two weeks of Israeli siege.

So far 381 bodies have been recovered since Israeli forces vacated the hospital on 1 April, however, this does not include those buried inside the hospital grounds, which were exhumed today.

According to Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defence, "the witnesses and civilians who were trapped inside the hospital when it was raided said that the surroundings "were full of corpses".

Some of the bodies were found underground or plastic sheeting, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday in an X publication. "Hospitals should never be militarized," he said in a video message.

The exhumation efforts also involve the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which arrived in Al-Shifa from the beginning of this month, however, the Tel Aviv forces denied them access.

"Shifa has literally become a graveyard... There are bodies still in this courtyard," Jonathan Whittall, a senior humanitarian affairs officer for OCHA.