Gaza doctors struggle to investigate ‘signs of torture’ on unnamed dead
BBC:
Out of a single room, with no DNA testing facilities or cold storage units of its own, the forensics team at Gaza’s Nasser hospital face the challenges brought by peace.
Over the past eleven days, 195 bodies have been returned to Gaza by Israeli authorities, in exchange for the bodies of 11 Israeli hostages, under the terms of Donald Trump’s ceasefire deal.
Two other bodies – those of Tanzanian and Thai hostages – have also been returned.
Photographs released by Gaza’s medical authorities show some of the bodies badly decomposed, and arriving in civilian clothes or naked except for underwear, some with multiple signs of injury. Many have their wrists tied behind their backs, and doctors say some bodies arrived blindfolded or with cloth roped around their necks.
The forensic team at Nasser hospital are working with almost no resources to answer vast questions about torture, mistreatment and identity. The head of the unit, Dr Ahmed Dheir, said one of their biggest limitations is a lack of cold storage space. The bodies arrive in Gaza thoroughly frozen and can take several days to thaw out, ruling out even basic identification methods like dental history, let alone any deeper investigation or post-mortem (autopsy).
“The situation is extremely challenging,” he said. “If we wait for the bodies to thaw, rapid decomposition begins almost immediately, putting us in an impossible position [because] we lose the ability to examine the remains properly. So the most viable method is to take samples and document the state of the bodies as they are.”
The BBC has viewed dozens of photographs of the bodies, many of them shared by Gaza’s health authorities, others taken by colleagues on the ground.
We spoke to several of those involved in examining the bodies in Gaza, as well as families of the missing, human rights groups, and Israeli military and prison authorities. We also spoke to three forensic experts outside the region, including one specialising in torture, to educate ourselves about the medical processes involved in this kind of investigation – all agreed that there were questions that were difficult to answer without post-mortems.