UN human rights commissioner “horrified” by mass grave in Gaza | middle East

The United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk​, said he was “horrified” by the destruction of the Nasser and Al-Shifa hospitals in the Gaza Strip, and by the news of mass graves discovered there. Türk​ called for an independent investigation after Palestinian authorities removed 310 bodies from a mass grave at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, from where Israeli troops withdrew in the first week of April.

The existence of the mass grave was reported on Sunday and the numbers continue to grow, as civil protection units continue to recover more bodies: 73 on Monday, 35 on Tuesday morning.

Among the bodies removed are “children, women, medical personnel, people who were injured and patients”, describes Hani Mahmoud, an Al-Jazeera journalist based in Rafah, seven kilometers from Khan Yunis, citing the Civil Defense of the Palestinian enclave. According to Mahmoud, people who managed to leave the hospital before the evacuation report scenes of “horror, mass murders and arrests on such a scale that the entire hospital went from being a place of healing to becoming a mass grave”.

Taking into account “the climate of impunity”, the investigation into what happened in the hospitals surrounded and occupied by Israel in Gaza “must include international investigators”, said Türk​ in a statement, stressing that hospitals are entitled to special protection.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) insist that they were forced to fight inside hospitals because it was from these that many Hamas members operated, allegations denied by doctors and the Islamist movement.

But Türk​ also condemned a series of IDF attacks that in recent days have killed mainly children and women in Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip. “The last images of a premature child being removed from its dying mother’s womb [a agência Reuters divulgou a fotografia do bebé]of the two adjacent houses where 15 children and five women were killed – this is beyond the war”, he stated, quoted in site of the High Commissioner’s office.

Türk​ referred to different attacks between April 19 and 20 in several neighborhoods of Rafah: on April 19, nine Palestinians, including six children and two women, died in an attack on an apartment building; the following day, an attack on two adjacent houses killed 15 women and five children, on the same day that an attack on the As-Shabora camp left four dead, including a pregnant woman.

“Every ten minutes a child is killed or injured. They are protected by the laws of war and, despite this, they are the ones who are disproportionately paying the highest price for this war”, Türk further denounced.

According to Gaza authorities, as of Monday, at least 34,151 people had been killed in Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, including 14,685 children.