Gaza- “I was watching the dogs eating the corpses of my three friends, and I was unable to stop them or do anything. She spent 10 full days eating their meat until she turned them into skeletons and then dragged them away,” the young man Louay (31 years old) from the northern Gaza Strip told Tel Aviv Tribune Net.
Last October 25, Louay tried to flee with his friends from the western areas of Jabalia Camp to Gaza City before an Israeli drone surprised them with a missile that killed all three of them, leaving him in a serious condition.
The young man – who preferred not to mention his full name – remained alone, taking the remains of a bombed house as a refuge, trying to heal his wounds himself for more than two months until he was able to seize the opportunity and reach Gaza City, to tell the details.
Complex situations
Louay says that stray dogs walk in groups, and if they find a body lying in the streets, they stay in the place until they finish their mission by devouring it. This is what happened with his friends, whom he watched daily from behind the building without being able to pull them out due to his deteriorating health condition and the fear of being discovered by the occupation soldiers. If he had not been there, no one would have known their identities.
With the start of the Israeli military operation in northern Gaza in early October 2024, the army used violent bombing as a means to force the Palestinians to evacuate their homes and prevent the work of ambulance and civil defense crews, which further complicated the field conditions that prevented the injured and martyrs from reaching the streets, leaving them left in the streets. Since then, appeals from citizens to retrieve dozens of bodies have continued, but to no avail.
Tel Aviv Tribune Net obtained a copy of a video clip, which was documented by the young man, Ahmed Ali (40 years old), on the morning of last November 19, when he managed to infiltrate and arrive to inspect his house in the Al-Saftawi area, close to the occupation army’s operations north of Gaza City.
Upon his arrival, Ali was surprised when a dog mauled the body of a young man lying in the road, which prompted him to use stones to move him away from the body after it had managed to maul his shoulders and stomach.
He told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that he was forced to crawl for fear of sniper fire, and he was able to tie the martyr’s feet with a long rope in order to pull him without him having to be in the middle of the road. He succeeded in getting him out to a safe area, and he was buried by the local authorities in a medical clinic in the Sheikh Radwan area in Gaza City after he was not recognized. Sunday.
Serious issue
Tel Aviv Tribune Net also obtained a special video clip dating back to the fourth of last December, of a dog mauling the body of a young man in the same area that is currently witnessing an advance by the occupation army forces and intense artillery shelling, as no one was able to pull out the body that remained lying on the ground due to… The danger of reaching it, while the identity of the young man who was attacked by a quadcopter drone was not known.
On December 5, the young man, Youssef (29 years old), was able to leave northern Gaza via a bypass road away from the checkpoint set up by the occupation army east of Jabalia camp for fear of arrest. He told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that he traveled approximately a thousand meters on a very dangerous road in which a number of Palestinians were martyred after being targeted by army fire as they were trying to escape from it.
Youssef – who preferred to mention only his first name – was surprised while on his way to see the prosthetic leg of one of his neighbors who had tried to go out with his son – days before him on the same road – and he learned that it was evidence of the martyrdom of its owner after he and his son were reduced to a pile of bones without any of their features showing after they were mauled. Dogs share their bodies with others.
In this context, Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for the Civil Defense Service in the Gaza Strip, says that despite the presence of 10,000 people under the rubble of homes in various governorates of the Strip, the most serious issue currently is the spread of the bodies of martyrs in the streets of northern Gaza, and their exposure to stray dogs as a result of the inability of defense crews to Civil and service providers have access to the area.
He added to Tel Aviv Tribune Net that more than 5,000 people have been killed in the northern Gaza Strip since the start of the military operation 3 months ago, and a large number of them are still in the streets and under the rubble.
One of the citizens who left northern Gaza was quoted as saying that the stray dogs were small and weak in structure due to the absence of food and did not have the ability to attack and assault citizens at the beginning of the ground operation there, but now they have become large in size and can attack and assault citizens.
Systematic policy
According to the Civil Defense spokesman, hungry dogs used to need a maximum of 6 hours to devour a whole corpse, but now they need days to devour it after they were afflicted with a glut of human flesh, and this indicates the presence of large numbers of martyrs in the streets.
He stressed that they had received many appeals about the presence of martyrs on the roads, but the rescue crews could not do anything after the occupation prevented them from reaching those areas. He added, “If the occupation forces withdraw, we will be there immediately, but most likely time will run out and we will only find the bones and skeletons of the martyrs.” .
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Observatory documented what it described as many recurring patterns of preventing the burial of victims and deliberately leaving them in the open, in addition to scenes published by members of the Israeli army themselves showing them throwing the bodies of Palestinians to be eaten by stray dogs, in violation of international law.
Lima Bustami, Director of the Observatory’s Legal Department, considered that preventing the burial of the bodies of victims has become “a systematic act that reflects the utmost levels of humiliation and inhumanity, and represents part of a deliberate strategy aimed at eliminating the spiritual and material presence of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Bustami told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that this act shows “Israel’s intention to perpetuate genocide as a comprehensive act that extends beyond killing, and when the bodies are left exposed to be eaten by hungry animals, death itself turns into a message of horror directed to the rest of the population.”
She added that preventing the burial of bodies and the resulting mutilation are classified as serious crimes under international law, as the Hague and Geneva Conventions prohibit any degrading treatment, and mutilation of bodies is a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which criminalizes degradation of a person’s dignity that extends beyond After the death of a person.
Bustami stressed that what is happening is not limited to the victims, but is also torture for their families, as seeing the body of a dear person desecrated in this way exposes them to psychological suffering and harms them. The Rome Statute considers inhuman acts that intentionally cause severe suffering a crime against humanity as long as they are committed. In a large-scale attack directed against a group of civilians.
