Rafah, December 29 (RHC)-- The Gaza government's media office says Israel has handed over the mutilated bodies of 80 martyrs after harvesting their organs.  In a statement released on Tuesday, the media office said that the bodies were unidentified and that the occupying regime refused to specify the victim’s names or the places they were kidnapped from.

Previously, it added, the occupation forces exhumed graves in the northern Gaza city of Jabalia and stole some of the bodies of Palestinian martyrs.  It also called for “the formation of a completely independent international investigation committee into the occupation army’s kidnapping of the bodies of martyrs and theft of their organs.”

The mutilated bodies were buried in a mass grave in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement said the bodies released by the Zionist enemy were “in a state of decomposition and difficult to recognize.”  “What the enemy did can only be described as a war crime, a heinous crime, and a blatant violation of the sanctity and dignity of the dead,” it noted in a statement.

“Their barbarism and moral decline are confirmed in their aggression against our people, their assault on the bodies of our righteous martyrs, and the exhumation of their graves.”

Last month, a Geneva-based rights group raised concerns about organ theft from Palestinian corpses.   The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said it had documented Israeli forces confiscating dozens of dead bodies from the al-Shifa and Indonesian hospitals in northern Gaza, alongside others in the south. 

It cited remarks by medical professionals in Gaza, who found that vital organs, such as livers, kidneys, hearts, cochleas and corneas, were missing in the bodies released by Israel.   The medical staff also said Israel exhumed and confiscated corpses from a mass grave in a courtyard at al-Shifa hospital.

Israel waged the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 after Hamas carried out a historic operation against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Since the start of the aggression, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 20,915 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 54,918 others.  Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under the rubble in the Gaza Strip, which is under “complete siege” by Israel.