Rescue Teams Dig Up Over 50 Bodies Buried in Shallow Graves in Courtyard of Gaza City Clinic

Fadl Hmaid stood in the courtyard of the Sheikh Radwan clinic in western Gaza City on Tuesday (November 11), watching as emergency rescue teams dug up bodies from the ground. Hmaid hoped one would be his son, Mohammed, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Fallujah school in the Jabaliya refugee camp on July 10. Israeli forces had surrounded the camp and issued displacement orders to residents. Burying his son in the area was too dangerous, so Hmaid carried his body to the Sheikh Radwan clinic to bury him in the courtyard.

“I wanted to bury him in Jabaliya. My son’s will was to be buried there. But the area was surrounded, so I buried him here—in this small patch of land,” Hmaid told Drop Site. “The occupation bulldozed the area, and this is what we found. As you can see… We don’t know where the graves are, or where the martyrs are.”

Dozens of other Palestinians were buried in shallow graves in the courtyard of the clinic for the same reason. Following the so-called “ceasefire” that went into effect last month and the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops, Palestinians in Gaza have been digging up bodies from the rubble and from temporary mass graves to identify them and give them a proper burial. On November 11, Civil Defense teams arrived at the Sheikh Radwan clinic to exhume what are believed to be more than 80 bodies hastily interred there amid Israel’s genocidal assault.

“Since the ceasefire began, we’ve been in the first stage, still looking for our children,” Hmaid said. “I came to see—maybe, God willing, I’ll find my son’s body. His children keep asking; they want their father’s grave, so they can visit him,” he added. “This is the minimum. Just human dignity. Not here, where you see dogs coming every day. You find dogs eating the bodies. No one is taking care of them. Human dignity has been trampled. There is no dignity for human beings anymore here.”

Donning bright orange vests and wearing masks and gloves, Civil Defense teams set to work on Tuesday using nothing more than shovels, hoes, and their bare hands. The courtyard was surrounded by destroyed buildings with slabs of concrete hanging from twisted rebar and pancaked roofs.

Some of the exhumed bodies were wrapped in white body bags and buried just a few feet in the dirt. Other remains—bones and pieces of decomposed flesh mixed in with torn clothes—were removed individually from the earth and placed in small piles. One worker marked the body bags with the date of recovery—”11/11/2025”—and the words “unknown identity.”

“The Israeli military was close to this neighborhood and this location. The families couldn’t bury their loved ones and martyrs in official cemeteries, so they buried them in this health care clinic, which serves this neighborhood,” Abu Khalil, a member of Civil Defense, told Drop Site as he stood in the courtyard.

The Sheikh Radwan clinic itself has been partially destroyed, with one side of the building smashed in. “Now, our teams are working to recover the bodies, so that they will later be transferred to official cemeteries. After that, this place and the clinic will be renovated to become a place serving local residents and the people of the area.”

By November 12, 51 bodies had been recovered, with the work ongoing, Civil Defense said in a statement. The bodies were taken to Al-Shifa hospital for the difficult and often unsuccessful work of identifying them.

“This work is hard labor for the Civil Defense teams,” Abu Khalil said. “It requires bulldozers and heavy machinery for digging and quickly retrieving the martyrs and transporting them. However, up until now, these resources and machines have not been available to the Civil Defense. Our teams are still working on the recovery and excavation with shovels and grab hoes—using basic, primitive equipment to recover and transport them to official cemeteries.”

More than 10,000 Palestinians are estimated to be buried under the rubble across Gaza, and the task of retrieving and identifying them is almost insurmountable. Israel has not allowed the necessary equipment into Gaza to begin clearing the tens of millions of tons of rubble across the enclave or to retrieve the thousands of dead.

Since the “ceasefire” went into effect on October 10, 532 bodies have been recovered, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Forensic experts in Gaza have struggled to confirm their identities due to a shortage of DNA testing kits and other equipment.

Separately, Israel has also returned 315 Palestinian bodies in exchange for the remains of 21 Israeli captives as part of the agreement. All of them were unidentified, and many bore signs of torture, abuse, and summary execution. Only 91 have been identified so far, and over 180 who remained unidentified have been buried in mass graves, the health ministry said.

Over the past month, Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to look at harrowing photos of the remains of bodies either recovered from under the rubble or returned by Israel in an effort to try and identify their missing loved ones.

On November 11, Majid Ibrahim Al-Bazam, a resident of Sheikh Radwan, came to the courtyard of the clinic as Civil Defense teams were exhuming the bodies in a desperate attempt to find his brother.

“My brother has been missing since the 17th of September. He was in Al-Shati Camp, and on that date, he told his children, ‘I’m going to go to the market,’ and then he left and never returned,” Al-Bazam told Drop Site.

“Until now, neither his family nor we have had any information about him—no news. Is he alive, dead, imprisoned, or martyred? We don’t know anything about him. He is around 49 years old. He was wearing a short-sleeved woolen robe in an olive green color. He has a long beard, and his hair is a bit soft, with a big mustache,” he said.

“If we identified his robe, we would recognize him quickly, but up until now, we’ve searched through most of the bodies they’ve recovered, and we haven’t found him. We haven’t found him yet.”

Abdel Qader Sabah is a journalist and videographer in northern Gaza.

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