ANKARA

Thirty bodies of Palestinians were recovered from two mass graves at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the government media office said on Thursday.

The Israeli army launched a 14-day military raid on the hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, last month before withdrawing from there on April 1, leaving behind a massive trail of destruction.

“The bodies were found in two graves outside the emergency and kidney departments at the hospital,” Salama Marouf, head of the media office, said in a statement.

He said 12 of the victims have been identified.

“Women, elderly people and wounded patients were among the extracted bodies,” Marouf said.

“Some of the victims were handcuffed and stripped of their clothes, which indicates that they were executed in cold blood," he added.

Marouf said the Israeli army “deliberately hid the bodies, buried them deep in sand, and dumped waste on them.”

“The fate of around 1,000 people, including medical personnel and journalists, remains unclear since the Israeli army raided the hospital,” he said.

Marouf described the Israeli raid on the hospital as “the most heinous massacre known in history against a medical facility" that was bombed, torched and bulldozed.

Israel has waged a brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, 2023 cross-border attack by Palestinian group Hamas in which nearly 1,200 people were killed.

Nearly 34,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have since been killed in Gaza, and nearly 76,800 others injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.

The Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.

*Writing by Ahmed Asmar