Gaza Herald – The Government Media Office in Gaza has accused the Israeli occupation army of harvesting organs from the bodies of Palestinians killed during its genocidal war on the Strip, calling it a “horrific crime” that demands an urgent international investigation.
Director of the office, Ismail Al-Thawabta, said that Israel has handed over 120 bodies through the International Committee of the Red Cross in the past three days, most showing signs of field executions, systematic torture, and mutilation. Several bodies were returned with bound hands and feet, while others bore marks of strangulation and ropes around their necks, indicating deliberate extrajudicial killings.
Al-Thawabta confirmed that organs were missing from many of the bodies, including eyes, corneas, and internal organs, adding that such evidence “proves Israel’s involvement in organ theft during the detention of the corpses.”
He called for the formation of an independent UN-supervised international investigation committee to hold Israel accountable for its “grave violations of the sanctity of the dead,” which constitute a war crime under international humanitarian law.
Human rights experts note that such violations go far beyond isolated acts of abuse, they reflect a systematic pattern of execution, mutilation, and body theft targeting Palestinians as a form of collective punishment and genocide, as defined under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Before the ceasefire on October 10, Israel had been holding at least 735 Palestinian bodies in so-called “cemeteries of numbers,” according to the National Campaign to Retrieve Martyrs’ Bodies. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed in July that the “Sde Teiman” military camp alone held around 1,500 Palestinian corpses in inhumane conditions.
Rights groups say that Israel’s continued confiscation and desecration of Palestinian bodies constitutes an extension of its genocidal policy, aiming to erase victims’ identities, deny their families the right to proper burial, and inflict psychological terror as part of its broader campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people.
