Gaza’s Ministry of Health has refused to receive a container carrying the bodies of 88 Palestinians sent from Israel without prior coordination or information about their identities.
The procedures for receiving the container were suspended until Israel provides full data with the victims’ names, time of death and the location they were taken from, the ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app on Wednesday.
This is “the minimum right of these people and their families,” it stated. In a subsequent statement, Gaza’s Government Media Office described the shipment of unidentified bodies as a “inhumane and criminal move”.
Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported from central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah that “the bodies are unidentifiable because they are mostly decomposed”
There are signs that those bodies have been in Israel for a long time,” he said.“The Palestinian Health Ministry said that the Israeli military has deliberately concealed the identity of those Palestinian people.
There is no information about their names, genders and the location they have been kidnapped from. The circumstances of their abduction from the Gaza Strip are also unclear,” he added
According to the Palestinian Civil Defence, Israeli attacks on Gaza Strip houses and shelters have killed at least 53 Palestinians in the last 24 hours.
One person was murdered overnight on Wednesday after a house was attacked in Beit Lahiya, north of the enclave, and two Palestinians were killed in the Nuseirat refugee camp when an Israeli air strike hit their tent.