GENEVA: The United Nations called on Tuesday for international investigators to be granted access to all of Gaza ‘to assist with evidence-gathering’ as hundreds of bodies are pulled from the rubble.
The ongoing recovery of extensive human remains in the Palestinian territory, mostly of women and children buried in intense Israeli bombing campaigns, highlights the possibility that war crimes have been committed, the UN warned.
‘The remains of what appears to be entire families are now being unearthed at locations that were pulverised by Israeli attacks,’ UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement.
‘I worry the remains recovered so far may only be the tip of the iceberg,’ he added, pointing to how ‘much of Gaza has been flattened by Israeli bombing or demolition and clearing by heavy machinery and explosives’.
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza since Oct 2023 has reduced much of the Palestinian territory to rubble.
The UN rights office has previously documented particularly heavy Israeli attacks during the first months of the invasion, when it dropped up to 2000-pound bombs on residential buildings, as well as a school, refugee camps and a market, killing 200 people.
Digging with ‘bare hands’ Palestinian civil defence teams said this month they had recovered 96 bodies and human remains at one site southeast of Gaza City. The site had been probably struck in November 2023.And they report having recovered more than 800 bodies and other human remains from beneath destroyed buildings across Gaza since last November, the rights office said.
At the same time, more than 8,000 missing people are believed to still be under the rubble, but the UN cautioned on Tuesday that it was an ‘underestimate’.
Efforts to recover the bodies are complicated by Israel’s refusal to allow in heavy machinery for rubble removal.
Civil defence teams are reporting that they have ‘only one excavator left, and at times are being forced to dig through rubble with their bare hands’, Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN rights office in the occupied Palestinian territories, told reporters in Geneva.
‘At this pace, completing the recovery of the remaining bodies will take at least 10 more years, even longer,’ he cautioned.
At the same time, Turk highlighted that ‘many areas in Gaza where the Israeli military is deployed continue to be levelled by bulldozers with no respect for the dead under the rubble’.
Preservation of evidence Preserving evidence of violations, including at destroyed sites, was critical, his statement said, calling for ‘international investigators to be allowed into all parts of Gaza to assist with evidence-gathering’.
Volker Turk insisted that ‘every feasible effort must be taken to document and identify these victims, preserve forensic information and biological samples, record their burial locations and inform their families’.
‘The discovery of extensive remains under the rubble in Gaza City resurfaces (the) concerns of war crimes and other atrocity crimes, he said.-AFP