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Gaza. Published by CNN Investigates
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via Twitter (X)

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt
@FranceskAlbs

Inferno

Dec 4, 2025
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Updated Dec 6, 2025

CNN Investigates:

By Abeer Salman,Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Thomas Bordeaux, Jeremy Diamond, Gianluca Mezzofiore,Lou Robinson

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.”

‘It’s like the Bermuda Triangle’
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.

[Continue reading at CNN News Source Link]