To recover a body, the Israeli military used a fleet of tanks, drones and what locals call “explosion robots.”
They turned a neighborhood into a “killing zone”, digging up approximately 200 Palestinian graves and killing four civilians.
The focus of this overwhelming force is Ran Gvili, an Israeli policeman who was killed more than two years ago and was the last remaining Israeli prisoner after more than two years of Israel’s genocidal war against the besieged Gaza enclave.
his success recover On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed it as a promised victory. But just meters away from where Gweli’s remains were carefully extracted, a different, horrifying reality persists.
According to the National Commission on Missing Persons, more than 10,000 Palestinians remain buried under the rubble of Gaza, rotting in silence, disoriented and without identity.
Families are grieving for loved ones who are missing or thought dead.
There are no explosive robots clearing their way, no forensic teams flying in to identify them, and no global outcry to find them.
The international media was in no rush to report on them.
The excavation of the Batesh cemetery in Gaza City’s Tufa neighborhood has become an intrinsic symbol of a deadly double standard: a world in which an Israeli corpse attracts the attention of the military while thousands of Palestinian corpses are seen as part of a devastated apocalyptic landscape.
(Al Jazeera)
The “killing zone” around the grave
Gaza journalist Khamis Al-Rifi, who reported near the attack, detailed the scale of force used to isolate the area.
“It started with exploding robot Riffey told Al Jazeera. He explained that approaching the cemetery was impossible because tanks blocked the deadly perimeter, firing at anything that moved.
Riffey described a “wall of fire” created by artillery and helicopters to protect engineering forces close to the “yellow line” – Israel’s self-proclaimed buffer zone in Gaza. Inside this sealed area, witnesses and later obtained video footage showed that troops spent two days churning up the earth.
“They dug about 200 graves,” Al-Rifi said. “They pulled out the martyrs and tested them one by one until they found [Israeli] Body. “
This difference is most evident after the fact. Gweli’s body was flown to Israel for a dignified burial. Yet Palestinian corpses were left at the mercy of bulldozers.
“When citizens travel to the area [after the withdrawal]”They found the martyrs being released haphazardly… covered with sand by bulldozers,” Al-Rifi said. “Some bodies are still visible on the surface.”
“The largest cemetery in the world”
While Israel used satellite technology and a DNA laboratory to close the investigation into the missing police officers, Palestinian families were deprived of even basic excavation machinery.
Alaa al-Din Aklulo, spokesman for the National Commission for Missing Persons, said last November that Gaza had become “the largest cemetery in the world.”
“These martyrs are buried under the rubble of their homes…their last dignity has not been preserved,” Aklulo said. He stressed that it was a “fatal injustice” for the international community to mobilize resources for Israeli captives while preventing the entry of heavy civil defense equipment needed to rescue Palestinian victims.
Mostafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, told Al Jazeera on Monday that while he respected the right of any family to bury their dead, the contrast was inevitable. “The lack of equal treatment, the lack of respect for Palestinians as equal human beings is truly shocking,” he noted.
The price paid with blood
The dark irony of this Israeli action is that it creates new victims. Israel opened fire again on Tuesday morning as residents approached the desecrated cemetery to view the graves of their loved ones.
“Four martyrs fell in the area this morning,” Rifi said, noting that one of them was his relative Youssef Rifi, who had only gone to inspect the damage left behind.
In order to close the brutal chapter that has shaken its national psyche since October 2023, Israel opened new graves in 2026. The operation was a brutal microcosm of the war as a whole: the sanctity of life and death on one side was upheld at the absolute expense of the other.
