The Palestinian Civil Defense agency in the Gaza strip announced that the Israeli occupation handed the agency over the corpses of 80 unidentified people inside 15 bags on Monday, August 5. It is suspected that the corpses were previously seized by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) during in ground incursions that they carried out during their 10-month-old aggression on the Gaza strip.
The Israeli occupation authorities coordinated with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to hand the corpses over to the Palestinian authorities in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. The bodies, which were in different stages of decomposition, were buried in a mass grave at the Turkish Cemetery of Khan Younis.
Speaking to media outlets, the director of the Palestinian Civil Defense, Yamen Abu Suleiman, said that the Israeli occupation did not provide any information about the corpses, neither the names of the deceased people nor the areas where they were taken from. “We do not know if they are martyrs killed in Gaza or prisoners from Israel’s jails,” Abu Sulieman said.
The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) condemned Israel’s delivery of the unidentified corpses in a statement on Monday saying: it “exacerbates the suffering of the families of martyrs and the missing, who seek to know the fate of their abducted children or to bury their martyrs in a dignified manner.”
Hamas also added that returning the corpses “in a state of complete decomposition highlights the sadism of the occupation and the unprecedented level of crime in human history committed by the Nazi occupation army.”
On Monday, Palestinian woman, Wafaa Jarrar (49 years old), passed away due to severe injuries that she sustained while in Israeli detention. Wafaa was arbitrarily arrested last May during a raid that the IOF carried out in Jenin, in the northern West Bank. While in detention, Wafaa underwent a surgery because she was injured during the raid. The IOF claimed that she sustained those injuries after an explosive device hit the Israeli military vehicle, by which she was transported to prison.
Although Wafaa’s body was handed over to her family, her amputated legs were not. The Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs Commission and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club submitted an urgent request to the Israeli authorities on behalf of Wafaa’s family, to have her amputated legs back in order to bury them with her body according to Islamic Sharia law rituals. The husband of the deceased female prisoner, Abul Jabbar Jarrar (58 years old), was also arrested by the IOF in February, 2024, and he has been held in administrative detention ever since.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor published a report in June condemning the violations that the IOF committed against Wafaa Jarrar saying: “What Jarrar, age 49, was subjected to from the first moment of her arrest until her release reflects the repeated and systematic violations faced by Palestinians during their detention by Israeli forces, including arbitrary arrests, abuse, use as human shields, torture, and denial of medical care.”
At least 5 Palestinian people have been injured during an Israeli military operation in Jenin on Monday. While 4 of the injured people were killed in gunfire launched by IOF soldiers, the fifth, who is a woman, was injured as an IOF’s military vehicle collided with her car. The Israeli occupation army also stormed Aqaba town, in Tubas city in northern West Bank on Monday night killing at least 4 Palestinian people including a teenager.
