IDF admits digging up Gaza graves
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has admitted to digging up Palestinian graves in a Gaza cemetery.
Footage emerged earlier this week from a bulldozed graveyard in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where smashed graves lay open and human remains covered in shrouds had been left on the surface without being reburied.
The IDF said its soldiers dug up graves in the cemetery to see if dead hostages were buried there.
“The hostage identification process, conducted at a secure and alternative location, ensures optimal professional conditions and respect for the deceased,” it told NBC, the American broadcaster.
But photographs from the graveyard showed the extensive damage caused by the exhumations.
The tracks of heavy vehicles are imprinted on the ground amid the crumbling rubble of crushed gravestones and cracked open burial vaults.
Satellite images acquired by CNN show that 16 cemeteries in Gaza have been damaged by the IDF since the ground offensive began in late October.
One, in the Bureij refugee camp, has had a new dirt road laid over part of it by Israeli troops.
South Africa has cited the damage done to cemeteries in its case at the International Criminal Court alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Prof Janina Dill, the co-director of the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, told the broadcaster that the actions likely violated the rules of war.
“It [a cemetery] can only be intentionally attacked or destroyed if it becomes a military objective,” she said.
“There is huge symbolic meaning to the notion that not even the dead are left in peace.
“It suggests a disrespect towards the spiritual life of your enemy, their cultural life and heritage.
“It is evidence of an animus towards your enemy that is unhelpful in this context.”
The IDF insisted that it always treats the bodies it exhumes which do not turn out to be Israeli hostages “with dignity and respect”.
“If not for Hamas’s reprehensible decision to take Israeli men, women, children and babies as hostages, the need for such searches … would not exist,” it said.
