Amman, Aug. 8 (Petra) — Bodies have remained buried beneath the
rubble in Gaza for months, with their numbers revealing the grim toll
of Israel’s military campaign, which is aimed at uprooting families
and erasing the population’s presence and identity.

The discovery of bodies from the Al-Sabra massacre has shed further
light on what rights advocates describe as a campaign of
extermination aimed at erasing Palestinian existence in the Gaza
Strip from its roots.

Gaza did not bury “bodies” alone last Tuesday morning. It buried 112
people, each of whom had a voice, a laugh and an empty place at the
dinner table. The entire Abu Sharia and Hassaina families were
buried, including grandparents, parents, and children, after their
remains were recovered from beneath the rubble more than two and a
half years after they were killed.

As rescuers uncovered new details of the tragedy, they spent 136
consecutive hours working through stones and dust to recover 112
bodies, including 40 children, 38 women, and seven people with
disabilities. Another 157 bodies remain missing beneath the rubble. A
single residential neighborhood had thus swallowed 308 people in one
night in November 2023.

“This is not a figure in a report,” but a home that was once full of
life, the report said, adding that when the United Nations
Independent International Commission of Inquiry was asked whether the
pattern represented an isolated incident or a broader phenomenon, its
conclusion was that it constituted genocide.

Palestinian human rights researcher Islam Al-Tamimi told the Jordan
News Agency (Petra) that international law does not determine
genocide solely by the number of victims but also examines whether
there was an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a human group
what lawyers refer to as “specific intent.”

He said the International Court of Justice had found indications that
such intent existed, while the UN commission of inquiry had also
reached the same conclusion. He added that Law for Palestine had
submitted a complaint to the International Criminal Court documenting
more than 500 cases of direct incitement by Israeli leaders,
soldiers, and public figures, which it said contributed to an
environment conducive to genocide, including mass killings, serious
physical and psychological harm, and the imposition of living
conditions making survival impossible, as well as the destruction of
health, education, and the environment.

Al-Tamimi said what links the Al-Sabra massacre to other incidents is
the targeting of the family as an institution and the attempt to end
its continuity, which international law defines as preventing a group
from reproducing and continuing through future generations, under
Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

He said a fact sheet by the Independent Commission for Human Rights,
drawing on evidence presented by South Africa before the
International Court of Justice, documented four manifestations of
this pattern.

The first was the complete erasure of families from the civil
registry through the bombing of homes containing three generations at
once. Some 2,700 families were entirely wiped out, while more than
6,000 families were left with a single survivor carrying the sole
memory of an erased family, he said.

The second was a war that did not spare children, with more than
21,500 children killed, including premature babies who died in
incubators after electricity supplies were cut and others who died
from hunger and malnutrition.

The third was what he described as a war on motherhood, with more
than 12,500 women killed, pregnant women subjected to hunger,
maternity facilities destroyed, and supplies of milk and medicine
blocked, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,022 infants before
they reached one year of age.

The fourth was the profound psychological trauma caused by the loss
of a survivor’s sense of existence, memory, family lineage, and
identity.

Al-Tamimi added that attacks on families could not be separated from
the collapse of society as a whole. Education had suffered a severe
blow, with more than 20,000 students killed and hundreds of thousands
of school and university students deprived of education amid the
destruction of universities and attacks on academics. The health
sector had also collapsed as hospitals were destroyed and medical
personnel targeted, turning survival into a daily gamble.

The tragedy has been compounded by delayed justice, leaving survivors
suspended between mourning and uncertainty over the fate and remains
of their relatives while impunity continues.

International law expert Anis Fawzi Qasem said the latest reports of
the massacre point to atrocities even more brutal than those already
witnessed or reported during the Gaza war.

He said this further confirms that the Israeli military has
demonstrated itself to be among the world’s most degraded and
criminal armed forces.

Qasem said the latest report issued in June 2026 by the Independent
International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian
Territory supported this conclusion, stating that Israeli forces
intentionally and deliberately killed children.

He said this revealed the nature of the education, training, and
instruction given to Israeli soldiers by the military’s senior
leadership, amounting to training in unrestricted killing and
conveying the message that targeting civilians, including children,
was permissible.

Qasem said it might even be an understatement to say that the Israeli
military had seriously, repeatedly, deliberately, and systematically
violated virtually every legal rule governing armed conflict.

Recent figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics show
that since the outbreak of the Gaza war, more than 73,350
Palestinians have been killed, including about 21,500 children, more
than 1,022 infants and about 12,500 women, while around 9,500 people
remain missing. Children and women account for about 55% of the
victims, according to the figures. Hundreds were also killed during
periods covered by truces and ceasefires, indicating, the report
said, that the killing campaign had not stopped.

Against this backdrop, the report called for urgent justice,
including speeding up proceedings at the International Criminal
Court, documenting the four forms of the alleged destruction of
family continuity as evidence of specific intent, and pursuing all
those responsible.

It also called for transitional justice mechanisms to document
violations and preserve evidence, urgent and unconditional
reconstruction, and long-term psychological and social support
programs for sole survivors, children, and women.

In a related development, an analytical monitoring exercise by human
rights and media activist Tawfiq Shawar of reactions by Israeli users
on Channel 14’s Facebook page to a report about the burial of 112
victims from the Abu Sharia and Hassaina families found what he
described as a dangerous and worrying shift in public discourse
toward fascism and the dehumanization of victims.

The post drew widespread reactions, including inciting comments
calling for the victims to be “disposed of and transferred to garbage
containers” or “finely ground and thrown into sewage networks,” as
well as calls for their incineration.

The seriousness of the comments was compounded by the fact that they
came from people from different social and professional backgrounds,
including employees at major medical centers, doctors, lawyers, and
political figures, suggesting, according to the monitoring, that hate
and genocidal rhetoric had moved beyond isolated individual opinions
to become part of a broader and systematic social environment.

Commenting on these grave violations, public law professor and
political analyst Muath Walid Abu Dalou said Israel had killed
children, women, and men in Gaza under what he called false security
pretexts, which its actions in both the West Bank and Gaza had
exposed.

He said the recovery of bodies that had remained buried beneath the
rubble for years was compelling evidence of the scale of the military
brutality.

Abu Dalou said the actions constituted a flagrant violation of
international humanitarian law and the four Geneva Conventions, which
require the protection of civilians and civilian objects. The
enormous numbers of Palestinians killed, wounded, or missing, he
said, reflected the use of military force that had destroyed both
people and infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The report said its findings and documented facts were based on
official and human rights sources, including the Independent
Commission for Human Rights, the UN Office of the High Commissioner
for Human Rights, the Independent International Commission of
Inquiry, Law for Palestine, Human Rights Watch, the Palestinian
Health Ministry, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Gaza’s
civil defense service, the International Committee of the Red Cross,
the Palestinian news agency, WAFA, and other international
organizations.

//Petra// AF