Gaza Herald – The Palestinian Center for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons is calling for an urgent, independent international investigation into Israel’s mass bulldozing and coercive burial of Palestinian civilians near the Zikim crossing in northern Gaza, following a detailed CNN investigation that exposed systematic burial operations carried out by the Israeli army.
The center urged the International Committee of the Red Cross to immediately deploy forensic teams to recover the victims and ensure dignified burials.
The center said the evidence gathered, including hundreds of videos and images from the Zikim area, alongside eyewitness accounts and interviews with local aid truck drivers, confirms that Israel carried out a grave crime that requires rapid and independent international accountability.
The CNN investigation documented bodies dumped into shallow, unmarked pits and left exposed, alongside accounts of Israeli fire targeting Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid.
According to the center, the findings align with testimonies from families of the missing and survivors, as well as satellite imagery showing months of systematic bulldozer activity in zones where civilians were killed by Israeli airstrikes and direct gunfire. Witness reports also reveal that ambulances were blocked for days, while families later discovered decomposing bodies piled together, some pushed into pits alongside aid boxes.
The center stressed that Israel treated the bodies of Palestinian victims as debris to be removed or hidden, mirroring patterns documented across other parts of Gaza and echoed by statements from former Israeli occupation soldiers who described leaving civilian bodies to rot near military positions or burying them with heavy machinery.
The Palestinian Center demanded an international forensic mission to access the Zikim area and all other locations where Israel carried out mass or covert burials, identify the remains, secure burial sites, and compel Israel to release maps showing where the victims are buried. It held the U.S. Civil Coordination Center directly responsible for monitoring the area and called for immediate intervention, stressing that these crimes do not expire and accountability is essential to preventing their repetition.
