Israel military operation destroys a Gaza cemetery
The Islamic cemetery in southern Gaza was demolished, graves excised from the earth. A skull with no teeth rested atop the sandy, churned rubble.
The neighborhood of Bani Suheila in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, which soldiers showed foreign journalists Saturday, was obliterated, transformed by the military's search for underground Hamas tunnels. An Associated Press journalist saw a destroyed mosque and — where the cemetery had once been — a 140-meter-(yard)-wide pit that gave way to what the army called a Hamas attack tunnel underneath. The military said Monday that combat engineers had demolished part of the network, releasing a video showing massive explosions in the area.
As Israel moves forward with a ground and air campaign in Gaza that health officials in the besieged enclave say has claimed over 26,000 Palestinian lives, the military's destruction of holy sites has drawn staunch criticism from Palestinians and rights groups, who say the offensive is also an assault on cultural heritage. Under international law, cemeteries and religious sites receive special protection — and destroying them could be considered a war crime.
Israel says Hamas uses such sites as military cover, removing them of these protections. It says there is no way to accomplish its military goal of defeating Hamas without finding the tunnels, where they say the militants have built command and control centers, transported weapons and hidden some of the 130 hostages it is believed to be holding. They say digging up the tunnels involves unavoidable collateral damage to sacrosanct spaces.
“We're not naive anymore,” said Israeli Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus, who led journalists around the site Saturday.
Israel has made similar arguments in operations in and around Gaza hospitals.
Goldfus brought journalists inside a tunnel shaft he said stretched underneath the mosque and the cemetery. The journalists walked down a long concrete tunnel that branched in multiple directions and arrived at a small collection of rooms soldiers alleged were used by Hamas militants as a command and control center.
It included three domed rooms — one with four chairs, one with a desk, and a kitchen with empty cans of beans and a spice rack.