Editor’s Note: This story contains disturbing images.
Missing in Gaza: CNN investigation points to the Israeli military bulldozing the dead bodies of Palestinians seeking aid
Jerusalem
—
Ammar Wadi knew he was risking his life when he set out to get a bag of flour for his family from an aid truck near the Zikim crossing into Gaza in June.
“Forgive me mom if anything happens to me,” he wrote on his cell phone’s home screen. “Whoever finds my phone, please tell my family that I love them so much.”
Amid regular Israeli gunfire toward aid seekers this summer, Wadi never made it home and the message he left was delivered to his family weeks later by someone who found his phone. It was the last they heard from him.
Wadi is among the dozens of Palestinians whose loved ones say they vanished near Zikim and whose fates remain unknown.
A CNN investigation now points to the Israeli military bulldozing the bodies of some of those killed near the crossing into shallow, unmarked graves. At other times, their remains were simply left to decompose in the open, unable to be recovered in the militarized area.
The practice of mishandling bodies by bulldozing them into unmarked graves can violate international law, according to legal experts.
CNN’s review, which also found that aid seekers were killed by indiscriminate Israeli fire near the crossing, drew upon hundreds of videos and photos from around Zikim, along with interviews of eyewitnesses and local aid truck drivers.
Satellite imagery also shows bulldozing activity throughout the summer in the areas where aid seekers were killed. Two videos, geolocated by CNN to the Zikim area, show the aftermath of an incident in June, depicting bodies partially buried around an overturned aid truck.
CNN spoke with two former Israeli military members who described instances elsewhere in Gaza during the war in which the bodies of Palestinians were bulldozed into shallow graves. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) denied that it used bulldozers to “remove” bodies, but did not address whether they were used to bury them. The IDF told CNN the presence of bulldozers around Zikim was a “routine matter” used for operational purposes, such as dealing with explosive threats or “routine engineering needs.”
According to international law, the warring sides should cooperate in burying the dead in a way that allows them to be identified, said Janina Dill, co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.
“The purpose is to prevent the dead from becoming the missing and to allow for memorialization, chiefly by their families,” Dill said. “Moreover, if bodies are deliberately mutilated or mishandled in a way that violates their dignity, this can amount to ‘outrages upon personal dignity’ which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.”
Whether the IDF tracks sites where it has allegedly buried bodies remains an open question, however. One of the IDF whistleblowers told CNN that when his unit buried nine people in early 2024, the location of the grave was left unmarked. The IDF did not respond to CNN’s question about this incident.
Nearly six months after Wadi’s disappearance, his family is still without answers. Instead of finding comfort in his final phone message, however, Wadi’s mother, Nawal Musleh, is haunted by what she may never discover.
“When he comes to my mind, my eyes just cannot stop crying,” she told CNN. “We accept whatever God has written for us, but we just want to know what happened to our son.”
A pair of graphic videos posted to social media from September 11 – reviewed and geolocated by CNN – show a steady stream of Palestinians fleeing from the Zikim area hauling sacks of flour under a barrage of gunfire.
At least one person carrying flour appears to be shot from behind in the footage, with the gunfire seeming to come from the direction of an IDF position that CNN has identified in satellite imagery.
Robert Maher of Montana State University, an audio forensics expert, analyzed the videos for CNN and found the shots originated around 340 meters (1,115 feet) from the filming location, which corresponds to the distance from the IDF position.
In the other video, a group can also be seen tending to the bodies of one apparently dead and another severely injured person, before carrying them away. Meanwhile, the gunfire continues.
In a statement to CNN, the IDF said it “does not intentionally shoot at innocent civilians” and in instances where a threat arises, “fire is carried out for warning purposes or to neutralize the threat.”
Other footage and photos reviewed by CNN show multiple corpses that could not be retrieved from Zikim by other aid seekers or the civil defense due to the dangerous conditions.
On June 15, two eyewitnesses told CNN that one aid truck traveling from the crossing was swarmed by a crowd of hungry Palestinians. The aid trucks are operated by private local contractors in Gaza to pick up supplies from the crossing and drive them into the strip.
Shortly after the aid truck was surrounded, the Israeli military opened fire toward the vehicle, with many people appearing to have been shot and collapsing beneath the truck, the eyewitnesses said.
An ambulance operated by civil defense workers was permitted to access the area several days later.
“We were shocked by the scene,” one of the civil defense workers told CNN, who asked not to be named out of fear for his safety. “The (bodies) we recovered were decomposed – they had clearly been there for a while, there were signs that dogs had eaten parts of them.”
Videos obtained and geolocated by CNN to that location in Zikim show a crushed, overturned aid truck amid a pile of debris. Several decomposing bodies are scattered around the vehicle, partially buried in mounds of sand. A stray dog is seen nearby.
The civil defense team was only able to retrieve 15 bodies and, with the ambulance full, roughly 20 were never recovered, according to the worker. The IDF did not respond to questions about this incident.
A half dozen local aid truck drivers who worked the Zikim route spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity due to fears for their safety.
They described scenes of strewn and decomposing bodies as a common sight, with Israeli bulldozers at times clearing the corpses into the sand.
“I see dead people every time I drive through Zikim… I watched Israeli bulldozers bury the dead bodies,” one driver said. “If you passed through that area in July, you wouldn’t miss it; I kept my windows closed.”
“Israeli army bulldozers either bury them or cover them with dirt,” another driver said.
Satellite imagery and photos add to these testimonies, capturing a standing presence of Israeli bulldozers from late July to early August. Signs of bulldozer activity around the Zikim crossing are apparent beginning in mid-June, just after the aid route opened, until September 12, when it closed.
Some of the bulldozer activity appears related to clearing the aid route, which was frequently littered with boxes and debris.
At other times, satellite imagery shows bulldozing activity without a clear purpose, such as when a bulldozer pushed a 30-square-meter (322-square-foot) area of soil into a short pile in mid-June, around 400 meters (1,300 ft) away from where the overturned truck attended to by civil defense workers was found days earlier.
The bulldozers were also repeatedly used to demolish the ruins of buildings behind which aid seekers previously sought shelter from Israeli gunfire, as seen in numerous videos.
Two eyewitnesses told CNN that on September 7 – as people went searching near Zikim for any sign of their missing family members – they came across what they say appeared to be bulldozed corpses.
“I found the bodies there bulldozed along with the cardboard (aid) boxes… they pile them on top of each other,” Adel Mansour told CNN, one of the eyewitnesses who went looking for his 17-year-old son.
One aid truck driver who worked the Zikim routes told CNN: “It’s like the Bermuda Triangle; no one knows what’s happening in that area, and it seems no one ever will.”
These reports of the Israeli military bulldozing of the bodies of Palestinians are not isolated to the Zikim crossing. IDF whistleblowers who spoke to CNN and the anti-occupation veterans’ NGO Breaking the Silence (BTS) pointed to a broader pattern of the military mishandling the dead in Gaza during the war.
One IDF whistleblower, who previously served at an outpost in the Netzarim Corridor, spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
The soldier said that nine bodies of unarmed Palestinians were left to decompose for nearly two days around his base in early 2024. The smell of the rotting corpses became overwhelming as dogs scavenged the remains, he said.
“Our commander asked the D9s – the bulldozers – to cover up the bodies with sand,” he recalled. “Just to see this amount of bodies around you, when you see they’re unarmed, when you see dogs eating them to play with the bones and legs and skull. It’s terrible.”
To the whistleblower’s knowledge, no photos were taken of the bodies to allow for later identification or to mark the location. “The families maybe don’t know what happened with their loved ones,” he said.
BTS, which provides a forum for Israeli troops to speak out and verifies their accounts, also said that it had received numerous testimonies from soldiers on this practice.
Another former IDF soldier – a captain who served in a command center overseeing Israeli troops in Gaza in late 2023 – said he never received any guidance from the military specifying the treatment of the bodies of Palestinians killed in Gaza. When the body of a Palestinian killed by Israeli forces blocked a road in Gaza, he says officers in the command center ultimately decided to use a bulldozer to push the body into a shallow grave along the side of the road.
“We were never given any protocol or any order of how to handle at all any bodies of either combatant or non-combatant that we came across in the war,” the whistleblower told CNN on condition of anonymity.
The IDF did not respond to CNN’s questions about the testimonies from former soldiers.
Over the last two years, the Israeli military has repeatedly buried the bodies of Palestinians into unmarked, shallow or mass graves in locations across Gaza. This includes hundreds of bodies uncovered last year at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, according to authorities there, and the killing of 15 aid workers in the south of the territory in March, which were detailed in a CNN report.
The IDF has consistently denied burying Palestinians in mass graves.
Bulldozers have also been used at various points in the war by the IDF to systematically destroy Palestinian cemeteries. Last year, a CNN investigation found that the Israeli military desecrated at least 16 cemeteries in its ground offensive in Gaza, leaving gravestones ruined, soil upturned and, in some cases, bodies unearthed.
The IDF could not account for the destruction of the cemeteries identified, but said the military sometimes has “no other choice” but to target locations it claimed Hamas uses for military purposes and explained that bodies were removed from some gravesites in attempts to rescue hostages.
With many Palestinians who tried to get food this summer still missing, the desperate search for answers continues for their families. Some remain hopeful that their loved ones may still be alive somewhere, such as in Israeli detainment or displaced elsewhere in Gaza.
“Ammar (Wadi) was someone whose absence leaves a huge void – losing him feels like losing a part of yourself,” his brother Hossam said. “If he’s martyred, may God have mercy on him, but if he’s alive, at least we can hold on to hope.”
Credits:
Senior Producer/Reporter: Abeer Salman
Investigative Reporter/Producer: Yahya Abou-Ghazala
Visual Investigations Producer: Thomas Bordeaux
Jerusalem Correspondent: Jeremy Diamond
Supervising Editor, Visual Investigations: Gianluca Mezzofiore
Data & Graphics Editor: Lou Robinson
Supervising Investigative Producer: Barbara Arvanitidis
Senior Investigative Editor: Ed Upright
Senior Video Editor: Oscar Featherstone
Investigative Video Editor: Mark Baron
Managing Photojournalist: Alex Platt
Tareq El-Helou and Mohammad al-Sawalhi contributed reporting
