On Tuesday, the government media office in Gaza accused the Israeli occupation of stealing organs from the bodies of Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip, and called for the formation of an independent international investigation committee.
In coordination with the United Nations, according to a medical source, the bodies of about 80 Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli army and detained for a period during its ongoing ground operation in the northern Gaza Strip since October 27 arrived in Gaza earlier on Tuesday.
The government media office said in a statement, “After examining the bodies, it became clear that the features of the martyrs had changed significantly, in a clear indication that the occupation had stolen vital organs from the bodies of these martyrs.”
The statement indicated that the occupation handed over “unidentified bodies, refused to specify the names of these martyrs, and refused to specify the places from which they were stolen.”
The office denounced the army’s “disrespect for the dignity of the bodies of 80 Palestinian martyrs,” noting that they were delivered through the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing (south).
He stated that “the occupation repeated this crime (withholding bodies) more than once during the genocidal war. It had also previously exhumed graves in Jabalia (north of the Gaza Strip) and stolen some of the bodies of the martyrs from them.”
Independent investigation committee
The government media office called for “the formation of a completely independent international investigation committee into the occupation army’s kidnapping of the bodies of martyrs and theft of their vital organs,” pointing out that Israel is still detaining “the bodies of dozens of martyrs from Gaza.”
The office condemned what it described as “the silent positions of international organizations operating in the Gaza Strip, such as the Red Cross, regarding such terrible crimes committed by the occupation army.”
The director of Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital in the city of Rafah (south), Marwan Al-Hams, told Anadolu Agency, earlier Tuesday, that the United Nations informed them of “the arrival of the bodies of about 80 martyrs to Gaza.”
Al-Hams explained, “The bodies arrived inside a container. Some of them were complete bodies, others were body parts, and some had parts of their bodies decomposed.”
Since the seventh of last October, the Israeli army has been waging a devastating war on Gaza that, as of Tuesday, left 20,915 martyrs, 54,918 wounded, most of them children and women, massive infrastructure destruction, and an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, according to the Gaza Strip authorities and the United Nations.