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KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — The Islamic cemetery in southern Gaza has been demolished and graves removed from the ground. A toothless skull lay on the sandy, jumbled rubble.
The community of Bani Suheila in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, which infantrymen showed to foreign hounds on Saturday, has been destroyed, remodeled thanks to the Hamas army’s search for underground tunnels. An Associated Press reporter saw a destroyed mosque and. . . Once it was there: a 140-meter-wide shaft that opened onto what the army called a Hamas attack tunnel underneath. The military claimed on Monday that combat engineers had demolished part of the network, and released a video showing large explosions in the area.
As Israel continues a ground and air crusade in Gaza that health officials say has claimed the lives of more than 26,000 Palestinians, the army’s destruction of holy sites has drawn harsh complaints from Palestinians and human rights groups, who say the offensive is also an attack on culture. heritage. Under foreign law, cemeteries and places of worship receive special coverage, and their destruction may simply be a war crime.
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Israel claims that Hamas is using those sites as military cover, isolating them from those protections. He says there is no way to achieve his army’s purpose of defeating Hamas without locating the tunnels, where they say the militants built command centers and transported weapons and hid some of the 130 hostages he held. They argue that digging tunnels produces inevitable collateral damage in sacrosanct spaces.
“We are no longer naïve,” the Israeli brigadier general said. Dan Goldfus, who led reporters on Saturday.
Israel has made similar arguments in operations in and around Gaza hospitals.
Goldfus led reporters into a tunnel he said ran beneath the mosque and cemetery. The journalists walked through a long concrete tunnel that branched off in several directions and came to a small set of rooms that the infantrymen would have used as a commando and means through the Hamas militants.
It consisted of 3 vaulted rooms, one with 4 chairs, another with a desk, and a kitchen with empty bean cans and a spice rack. An army commander said the tunnel, which contained a power transformer, fans, pipes with wires and switches, stretched for 800 meters and was connected to a larger network of tunnels in southern Gaza.
The army claims to have discovered similar labyrinths of rooms in tunnels in the Gaza Strip. According to the newspaper, the facilities shown to journalists on Saturday included the workplace of a Hamas commander, an operations room and living quarters for senior Hamas members. The tunnel was allegedly used to plan attacks on the army.
The demolished cemetery, according to satellite analysis, appears to have been the Shuhadaa Bani Suheila cemetery.
Since Israel declared war on Hamas on Oct. 7, it has continuously accused the Islamic militant organization of using Gaza’s civilian sites as a canopy for military purposes. He says the army’s operations, ranging from hospital assaults to excavations of cemeteries and destruction of holy sites, are necessary to dismantle the militants’ command centers and bunkers.
On October 7, Hamas militants invaded southern Israel, killing another 1,200 people and bringing some 250 hostages back to Gaza. More than 100 hostages were exchanged for Palestinian prisoners during a week-long ceasefire in November.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Gaza has displaced as many as 2. 3 million people from the country. According to a UN observer, the army has destroyed 161 mosques in its operations. The company said it had not counted the number of cemeteries destroyed.
On Saturday, Goldfus ran his gloved hand over the lunar landscape around him. The mosque’s golden dome cracked and shifted, collapsing onto its shattered walls.
Goldfus said Israeli forces destroyed the mosque after militants fired on them from inside its compound. Footage broadcast by Israeli media showed foot soldiers exploding explosives to blow up the walls of the mosque’s first floor, collapsing it.
UNESCO has called on both Hamas and Israel to refrain from attacking culturally important sites.
Under the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that established the International Criminal Court, cemeteries and mosques receive special coverage as “civil property. “Destroying those sites would likely be a war crime, according to the U. S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Israel argues that sites lose their coverage when they are used for military purposes and when the operational benefit they generate outweighs the loss of civilian lives and infrastructure.
Goldfus said the forces had uncovered other lines of Hamas activity in the area, from confiscated AK-47s to a map of the Gaza-Israel border that he said could have been used through Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack.
He said destroying the mosque and digging up the cemetery was integral to locating some 60 tunnel shafts in the area. The journalists were shown only one shaft.
The dismantling of the tunnel network, Goldfus said, poses a “conundrum” for the military. He said it’s tricky to function in the domain without damaging sacred sites and even human remains.
“We strive to keep them as far away as possible,” he said when asked about the exhumed bodies. “But remember, when we’re fighting in this place and your enemy flanks you over and over again and there’s those complexes to hide, there’s not much you can do. “
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