Gaza receives 80 bodies of unidentified Palestinians from Israel: officials

Civil Defence agency in Gaza has said it received the bodies of 80 unidentified Palestinians from Israel, which it buried in a mass grave.

"We received 80 bodies inside 15 bags, with more than four martyrs in each bag, each wrapped in a single shroud", Civil Defence Director Yamen Abu Suleiman said on Monday.

Abu Suleiman said Israeli authorities did not provide any information about the bodies, including their names or where they were found or taken from.

"We do not know if they are martyrs (killed in Gaza) or prisoners from (Israel's) jails", he added.

In a video released by the Health Ministry in Gaza, men in hazmat suits could be seen inspecting the corpses wrapped in blue plastic sheeting, before unloading them from the shipping container they had arrived in.

The footage then showed the bodies being laid in a line for burial in a mass grave dug in the sand.

The bodies were later buried at the Turkish cemetery, near Khan Younis, the main city in the southern part of Gaza, journalists said.

'Suffering of families'

Salwa Karaz, a displaced woman from Gaza City in the north, said that she had gone to the Turkish cemetery hoping to find her 32-year-old son Marwan, who went missing in January.

He left behind an eight-month-old son.

"When we learned that 80 bodies had been handed over, we came to search in hopes of finding him among them", the 59-year-old said.

"As of now, we have not learned anything," she lamented.

"We will try to identify him through his clothes. He was wearing brown pants, a navy blue shirt, a black jacket, and beige boots."

She last saw him leaving on his bicycle from their shelter in Deir al Balah, central Gaza.

In a statement released on Monday, Hamas said Israel's delivery of bodies without identities "exacerbates the suffering of the families of martyrs and the missing, who seek to know the fate of their abducted children or to bury their martyrs in a dignified manner".