About 200 bodies recovered from mass grave in Nasser hospital complex, says Gaza official

Gaza's Civil Defence agency said on Monday that health workers had uncovered around 200 bodies over the past three days of people killed and buried by Israeli forces at a hospital in Khan Younis. 

The Israeli military did not offer an immediate comment.

"Our civil defence crews are still recovering bodies from inside Nasser Medical Complex, and since Saturday bodies of nearly 200 martyrs have been retrieved," said Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for Gaza's Civil Defence.

Bassal said several of the recovered bodies had decomposed. "There is difficulty identifying them, but civil defence efforts are ongoing," he said.

Ismail al-Thawabta, head of the Hamas government media office in the Palestinian territory, gave a higher figure of 283 bodies found at the hospital.

"We discovered mass graves inside Nasser Medical Complex" of people killed by "the occupation (Israeli) army", Thawabta told journalists.

Muhammad al-Mughayyir, a senior official at the civil defence agency, also confirmed the discovery of corpses at the facility and said the work to retrieve the remaining bodies would continue until Thursday.    (AFP)