GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: Bereaved Palestinians on Saturday reburied bodies exhumed from a cemetery in Gaza City, where the Israeli army has been leading a ground offensive against Hamas militants since late October, an AFP video showed.
The footage from the cemetery in Al-Tuffah neighborhood showed bodies wrapped in bags and laid out on mounds of soil.
Other bodies were strewn around smashed up graves, as a dozen men clad in masks worked with shovels to rebury them, the video showed.
Hamas on Saturday accused the Israeli military of “destroying 1,100 graves” at the cemetery and “stealing 150 bodies of recently buried martyrs.”
When reached for comment by AFP, the Israeli army said they were checking the claims without elaborating further.
“We were surprised to see the bodies exhumed” on Saturday morning, said a local man surnamed Aliwa, who was among the people reburying the bodies. He declined to give his first name.
Without offering evidence, he accused the Israeli army of “running over bodies” with a “bulldozer.”
Imprinted in the soil near the graves were what looked like track marks.
“We are currently retrieving the corpses present in the cemetery,” he said, adding that only a “small number” of bodies had been identified.
The war began on October 7 with an unprecedented Hamas attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
The militants also took around 250 hostages, 132 of whom remain in captivity, according to Israel.
Israel responded by bombarding the territory and sending in ground forces, killing at least 22,722 people, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.