Palestinian officials in the Gaza Strip on Thursday increased the tally of bodies discovered in a mass grave on the grounds of a hospital to 392 from 283, amid conflicting accounts between Israel and Gaza authorities over how and when some of the bodies were buried.
“This is the biggest mass grave since the beginning of the war,” Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defense, a search and rescue department, said Thursday before calling for an international investigation.
A New York Times analysis of social media videos and satellite imagery found that Palestinians had dug at least two of the three burial sites weeks before Israeli troops raided the complex.
Gaza authorities say that mass graves had been dug on the hospital grounds before an Israeli raid there in February but accuse Israel of later opening the site to add bodies.
It was not clear how those who were buried at the Nasser Medical Complex in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis had died or exactly when.
Israel on Thursday denied accusations that it was responsible for digging the graves at the complex but previously said it had opened them in the search for the bodies of hostages abducted to Gaza.
In the chaos of the six-month war, it has become common for Palestinians to bury the dead on hospital grounds, in backyards, and elsewhere, often hurriedly and without ceremony. But the rising tally of bodies pointed both to the human toll of the war and to how hospitals have become flashpoints.
The medical centers have often been the first places people displaced by Israel’s bombardment have taken refuge, and their grounds have hosted thousands in makeshift tents. Aid groups, researchers, and international bodies have increasingly been calling Israel’s dismantling of Gaza’s medical capacity “systematic.”
Videos shared on social media and verified by the Times show that two sites with multiple mass graves were dug at Nasser, and bodies were buried starting in January.
Satellite imagery shows that the large mass grave first dug by Palestinians underneath the palm trees in the southern part of the complex was disturbed by Israeli forces, including with a bulldozer, lending credence to the Israeli claim that they exhumed and reburied bodies.
There is no clear sign that Israeli troops dug new graves or added bodies to existing ones.
On April 21, videos were shared on social media that showed a third gravesite on the other side of a brick pathway that runs next to the initial mass grave. This new gravesite was created either during or after the Israeli occupation of the hospital grounds, but it is unclear who dug it. Signs written in Arabic at several of the graves read “Unknown martyr.”
The discovery of the graves last weekend has led to international calls for an independent investigation.
Joining the European Union and the United Nations, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, urged the Israeli government to “thoroughly and transparently” investigate the “deeply disturbing” reports of mass graves.
“We have been in touch at multiple levels with the Israeli government,” he said at a briefing Wednesday. “We want answers,” he added.
of plastic he had wrapped him with were gone, and the third was torn off but held together with plastic clips.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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