392 Bodies, 78 Children, No Investigators
The Mass Graves of Nasser Hospital and the Machinery That Protected Them
This is the story of Donia Abu Mohsen, who was thirteen years old when an Israeli airstrike killed every member of her family, and who survived it, and who was transferred to a hospital ward to recover, and who was shot and killed inside that ward two months later by Israeli fire. It is the story of 78 children recovered from the soil of a hospital compound in Khan Younis, their hands bound, their names unknown to the people who dug them out. It is the story of 327 people who cannot be identified because the tools of identification, the labs, the records, the DNA infrastructure, were destroyed along with everything else. It is the story of families who stood at a perimeter in April 2024 and watched a single bulldozer move earth in a hospital courtyard and waited to find out whether someone they loved was underneath it. It is the story of what was done to them, of who armed the people who did it, of who blocked the investigators who might have named it, and of the institutions that produced statements in correct legal language and then watched the evidence decompose in the ground. It is the story of Gaza. It is still happening.
On April 20, 2024, thirteen days after Israeli forces withdrew from the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Palestinian families returned to find what the army had left behind. The compound they entered was not recognisable as a hospital. It had been converted into a military installation during the months of occupation, its wards stripped and repurposed, its grounds reconfigured. What the Civil Defence teams found, beginning that day, was distributed across three specific locations within the compound: behind the morgue, in front of the morgue, and beside the dialysis building. The earth over each site had been compacted. There were no markers. There was nothing that acknowledged the presence of the dead.
They had one bulldozer. They dug for seven days.
When the operation ended, teams had recovered 392 bodies. Col. Yamen Abu Suleiman, the Director of Civil Defence in Khan Younis, estimated the three sites held as many as 700. Of the 392 exhumed, only 65 could be identified by relatives. The rest were too decomposed, too mutilated, or too damaged by the conditions of their burial to be named without forensic infrastructure that was not present and would not come. Dr. Muhammad Al-Mughair, head of evidence at Civil Defence, confirmed to NBC News that 78 of the recovered dead were children. Ten bodies had their hands and feet bound with zip ties. Others lay in hospital gowns with intravenous cannulas still inserted in their skin, urinary catheters still attached. Twenty bodies bore indications Abu Suleiman described as consistent with having been buried while still alive. The gunshot wounds to the head, the stacking of bodies rather than their arrangement, the waste layered over them before the soil was compacted: Abu Suleiman told a press conference on April 25 that the physical record was consistent with field executions.
The Israeli government called the reports “fake news.” The Israeli military told CNN its operations at Nasser had been conducted “in a targeted manner and without harming the hospital, the patients and the medical staff.”
The families at the perimeter knew someone was in the ground. They did not yet know which ground, or how many holes there were in Gaza that held people they were looking for.
Nasser Medical Complex was built to serve Khan Younis and its surrounding communities, and had grown by 2023 into the largest functioning hospital in southern Gaza, a referral facility for the territory’s southern population. By the time Israel began its systematic ground campaign, the hospital was receiving casualties at a rate its capacity could not absorb. MSF deployed surgical teams inside. When the civilian population was ordered south, Nasser became the destination for the displaced and the wounded simultaneously. At its peak in late 2023, approximately 700 patients were inside.
On December 17, 2023, Israeli fire entered the maternity ward and killed Donia Abu Mohsen. She was thirteen years old. She was an amputee. A previous Israeli airstrike had already killed her entire family, and she had been transferred to Nasser to recover. She is the named dead at a facility that would soon produce hundreds of the unnamed. Her name is here because the record requires it.
The siege that preceded the assault began in earnest on January 23, 2024, when the Israeli army issued formal evacuation orders for residential blocks 107 through 112, placing the hospital compound at the centre of a military perimeter. By late January, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported the facility had exhausted food, anaesthetics, and painkillers. Doctors were performing surgery without power, making triage decisions under the conditions of starvation. The roads out were either under fire or destroyed. There was nowhere to refer patients who needed higher-level care.
On the night of February 14 to 15, Israeli forces shelled the orthopaedic department, killing one patient and wounding eight others. Troops entered the compound the following morning. After electricity was severed during the entry, at least five patients on oxygen support died. MSF documented what followed in forensic sequence: siege, assault, forced evacuation, collapse. The MSF head of mission in Palestine, Leo Cans, described what he found in March: “No more electricity, no more water, no more medicines, and no more patients. The 700 patients have been forcibly evacuated.”
WHO staff who attempted to enter on February 17 and 18 could not reach the hospital by vehicle. An impassable ditch fifty meters from the entrance stopped them. They walked in, identified themselves clearly to Israeli forces upon entering the compound, and requested access to assess the patients remaining inside. Both requests were denied. They were permitted to inspect the generator, which had stopped functioning after running out of fuel. They confirmed that at least five patients in the ICU had died before any evacuation mission could reach them. A paralysed patient with a spinal fracture, referred to Nasser from Al-Ahli Hospital in the north during earlier WHO evacuation work, had to be moved again despite his condition. Two paralysed patients transferred during the missions required continuous manual ventilation throughout the journey because there were no portable ventilators.
Between October 7, 2023 and March 12, 2024, WHO recorded 410 attacks on healthcare facilities across Gaza. Nasser was not an exception. It was one of 410 documented incidents in a five-month period, one specific data point in a campaign that would go on to damage or destroy 94 percent of Gaza’s hospitals.
Abu Suleiman’s April 25 press conference, the testimonies collected by Akram al-Satarri who attended directly and then reported to Democracy Now! from Khan Younis, and the Civil Defence statements between April 21 and 26 constitute a forensic record. Read as such, not as competing claims against Israeli denials, the evidence is this:
Children found with their hands bound behind their backs. Patients removed from active treatment, still wearing their hospital gowns, still bearing their IV lines, buried in compacted earth in hospital grounds their military occupier controlled for months. Bodies stacked rather than laid out, covered with waste before the soil was packed above them. Gunshot wounds to the head at proximity. Twenty individuals whose manner of burial was, in the judgment of the Civil Defence officials who exhumed them, consistent with having been placed in the earth while they were still alive. Seventy-eight children across 392 bodies, in a compound the Israeli military described as a legitimate military target it had entered to find Hamas fighters and undelivered medicine for Israeli hostages.
At Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, separately raided, separately abandoned in early April 2024, a second burial site: more than 30 bodies with hands tied, buried in front of the emergency building and beside the dialysis centre. Elderly patients. Wounded people still in the clothing hospitals put on their patients. People of multiple ages whose identities could not be established because the forensic infrastructure that would allow identification has not been permitted to arrive.
Abu Suleiman had one bulldozer because Civil Defence resources allowed nothing more. He estimated 300 or more bodies remained in the ground beneath those three locations at Nasser alone. The families who had gathered at the perimeter were looking at soil that might be holding someone they had lost, and the extraction was being done by one machine by an organisation without the personnel, the equipment, or the international legal support that mass grave forensics requires.
This is the record of one compound in one city. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, maintaining field documentation teams across Gaza since October 7, 2023, had by this point recorded more than 130 mass grave sites across the territory’s northern, central, and southern governorates: hospital courtyards, school grounds, mosques, residential streets. Not the sites of pitched military battles. The locations where people were killed in the structures built for their protection, in the places where civilians exist, and then buried in the ground beneath those structures by the forces that controlled those structures.
The graves at Nasser exist within a destruction that has no modern parallel in its speed and geographic concentration. Gaza is 365 square kilometres. By July 2025, UN satellite analysis found that nearly 78 percent of all structures across the territory had been damaged or destroyed. The Gaza Mortality Survey, a population-representative household study published in The Lancet Global Health and conducted between December 30, 2024 and January 5, 2025, estimated 75,200 violent deaths between October 7, 2023 and early January 2025, placing the figure 34.7 percent above the Gaza Health Ministry’s administrative records for the same period. The Ministry’s figures, in other words, were the conservative floor. A separate Lancet study published in November 2025 estimated that more than three million years of human life had been extinguished in Gaza. By February 2026, the Ministry put the confirmed death toll at 72,063, with 11,000 people still recorded as missing, their locations unconfirmed, their deaths unverified, their families waiting in the same condition as the families at the perimeter of the Nasser dig site. In January 2026, a senior Israeli army official told journalists that Israel accepted approximately 70,000 people had been killed in Gaza, confirming figures the Israeli government had spent two years dismissing as Hamas propaganda.
Among those 72,000 confirmed dead: 18,592 children. Among the wounded: more than 156,000. Among the destroyed: 94 percent of Gaza’s hospitals, the civil registration infrastructure that would make identification of the dead possible, the laboratories that hold the DNA testing capacity required to match remains to families, the morgue facilities at the facilities where the graves were found.
The 11,000 missing are not a bureaucratic category. They are people who entered a building, a hospital, a school, a shelter, and did not emerge on any record that anyone has been permitted to examine. Some portion of them are almost certainly among the dead at the 130 documented grave sites. Some are probably at sites that have not yet been found. Their families cannot hold a funeral. They cannot file a death certificate. They cannot grieve in any form that the law or their religion permits because no body has been confirmed. In Palestinian tradition, as in Islamic tradition more broadly, the burial of the dead is an obligation of the living toward those they have lost. The families outside the Nasser perimeter in April 2024 were being denied that. More than a year later, so are the families of the 11,000.
The international institutional response to the Nasser graves was complete, coordinated, and entirely ineffective.
On April 23, 2024, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk released a formal statement describing himself as “horrified” and calling for immediate and unimpeded access for independent investigators, citing the categorical protective status hospitals hold under the Fourth Geneva Convention. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called access “imperative.” On May 10, the fifteen-member Security Council issued a formal press statement demanding investigators be granted “unimpeded access to all locations of mass graves in Gaza to conduct immediate, independent, thorough, comprehensive, transparent and impartial investigations.”
The United States, asked by State Department correspondents whether it supported an independent international probe, declined to say yes. Washington’s position was that Israel should investigate itself. This was not diplomatic ambiguity. It was the stated policy of the government that had, between October 2023 and September 2024, provided $22.76 billion in military aid to Israel, according to research from Brown University’s Costs of War project, while invoking emergency authorities to bypass standard Congressional review and accelerate the shipments. By May 2025, the United States had completed 800 military airlifts to Israel since the war began, moving more than 90,000 tons of weapons, munitions, and armoured vehicles. Joe Biden had privately told associates that Israel was “carpet bombing” Gaza. He signed the transfer authorisations regardless.
The US had vetoed multiple ceasefire resolutions at the Security Council before the Nasser graves were discovered. The ceasefire resolutions that did eventually pass did so only after months of US obstruction. The same government that blocked the international mechanisms that could have stopped the killing was now, in May 2024, being asked whether it supported international investigation of the deaths those mechanisms failed to prevent.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber I unanimously issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, finding reasonable grounds to believe they bore criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed from at least October 8, 2023, through May 20, 2024. The specific charges included the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. The chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity.” The warrants remain in force as of 2026, upheld against Israeli legal challenges. Netanyahu has not been arrested. The United States described the warrants as “outrageous.”
Human Rights Watch stated in February 2025 that the Biden administration’s continued arms transfers made the United States legally complicit in Israel’s violations. Germany and Italy ranked as secondary suppliers. The United Kingdom maintained export licences while its lawyers argued the question of legality in domestic courts. Every government that continued arming Israel after January 26, 2024, the date on which the ICJ found it plausible that genocide was occurring and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent it, did so with that finding before them and chose to continue anyway.
By October 2025, Euro-Med Monitor was describing what Israel was doing to the evidentiary landscape in Gaza as institutionalised policy: the systematic barring of international journalists, independent investigators, and documentation teams from the territory, characterised explicitly as an effort to destroy material evidence before criminal examination could occur. The ICJ’s provisional measures, issued January 26, 2024 and requiring Israel to preserve evidence of potential violations, remained formally binding and formally unenforced.
Mass grave sites hold evidence with a biological expiration date. The International Commission on Missing Persons, issuing a statement from The Hague on April 24, 2024, specified what forensic archaeology and anthropology conducted to judicial standards can establish: cause of death, manner of death, the precise sequence of events at a specific time and location, and, through DNA sampling, the identity of each person buried. These are exactly what international criminal proceedings require to move from documentation to prosecution. The chain of custody must be established before decomposition makes it irreversible. In Gaza’s summer heat, with grave sites subjected to further military operations, the window compresses. At Nasser specifically, the combination of deep burial, compaction, waste covering, heat, and the passage of months between burial and discovery meant that of 392 bodies, only 65 were identifiable to the families who came to look. The remaining 327 will require forensic DNA infrastructure that has not arrived and, under current access conditions, will not arrive.
Medical Aid for Palestinians, which maintained field presence in Gaza throughout the conflict, published its assessment one month after the Nasser discovery. No independent international investigator had entered Gaza. MAP had received direct testimony from hospital staff raising concern that among the unaccounted-for dead were people killed in extrajudicial executions. Under the laws of armed conflict, extrajudicial execution is categorically prohibited and constitutes a war crime. MAP stated clearly that any investigation capable of satisfying international legal standards had to be conducted by independent international mechanisms, because Israel’s record demonstrated a consistent refusal to pursue genuine accountability for its forces’ conduct at healthcare facilities. Amnesty International’s Senior Director Erika Guevara Rosas put the consequence plainly: without forensic access to the specific circumstances of each burial, the full truth of those graves might never be established. The absence of access had already meant that only a fraction of what occurred in Gaza could be documented.
The 130 sites Euro-Med recorded represent what field teams could physically reach inside a besieged territory under active bombardment. It is not a ceiling. Gaza’s health infrastructure, its civil registration offices, its genealogical records, its identification systems, have been methodically destroyed. Amnesty noted that DNA testing was unavailable not because the technology does not exist but because the blockade and the destruction of Gaza’s medical sector had eliminated the capacity to conduct it. The families cannot identify their dead because the tools of identification have been removed from them. This is not incidental to the destruction. It is part of it.
What is happening in Gaza has a name in international law, and courts from The Hague to the ICJ have begun to assign that name with increasing precision. What is happening to the Palestinian dead is the extension of what has been done to the Palestinian living: the systematic removal of the capacity to be seen, counted, named, and mourned. The graves at Nasser are not a horror contained within the compound’s walls. They are the physical expression of a project that has killed more than 75,000 people by independent scholarly count, displaced nearly the entire population of a territory more than once, destroyed 94 percent of hospitals, eliminated civil registration, blocked forensic access, obstructed the ICC, defied the ICJ, and been supplied and politically shielded throughout by the world’s largest military power.
The Palestinian dead have names. Donia Abu Mohsen was thirteen. She had already survived a strike that killed everyone she loved, and she was recovering in a hospital ward when Israeli fire found her again. She has a name because she was named in reporting while she was still a person the world could protect. The 327 unidentified at Nasser do not have names in any recoverable record because the mechanisms of identification were removed from the people trying to identify them. That removal was not an accident of war. It was administered.
The families at the perimeter in April 2024 are still waiting. The 11,000 missing have not been found. The ICC warrants sit in a court whose enforcement depends on the cooperation of states that have chosen, repeatedly and explicitly, not to cooperate. The question that the institutions of international law cannot answer is not whether crimes occurred at Nasser Medical Complex. The question they cannot answer is whether the architecture built to prevent crimes of this scale has any meaning at all when the state committing them is underwritten by the power that funds those same institutions.