‘It felt like pulling my heart out of the earth:’ testimonies from the mass grave at Nasser Hospital

Content warning: This article contains graphic and disturbing images and descriptions of carnage.

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.