Gaza government says Israel returned 47 exhumed bodies

Gaza's Hamas-run government media office said on Thursday that Israel had returned dozens of bodies that had been exhumed from graves in the besieged territory in recent weeks.

The bodies were reburied on Thursday afternoon in the beach area near the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah.

Men in white hazmat suits aligned the bodies wrapped in blue plastic sheeting at the bottom of a trench, before a bulldozer covered them in sand as dozens of mourners looked on, an AFP correspondent reported.

"The bodies arrived through the Kerem Shalom crossing and were received by the ministry of health," Ihsan Al-Natour from the Hamas-run ministry of endowments told AFP at the funeral.

"We do not know the names or any other information about them," he added.

Israeli forces have taken bodies from Gaza to Israel on several occasions for examination as they look for hostages seized during Hamas's October 7 attack.

AFP journalists have previously witnessed the reburial of bodies which Gaza officials said had been exhumed by Israeli forces in November, December and January.

The 47 bodies sent back by Israel on Thursday were first "transferred to Al-Najjar Hospital" in Rafah in southern Gaza, the besieged territory's crossings and borders authority said in a separate statement.

"The bodies were seized and transferred to Israel under the pretext of examination and verification" to ensure they were not those of hostages held in Gaza, the government statement said.

Since the start of the war, Israeli officials have exhumed "hundreds" of bodies from graves at hospitals in the Palestinian territory, it said.

The Israeli army told AFP it was looking into reports about the latest group of returned bodies.

Hamas took around 250 Israeli and foreign hostages during the October 7 attack, dozens of whom were released during a week-long truce in November.

Israel believes that 99 hostages remain alive in Gaza and that 31 have died.

The October attack resulted in the deaths of around 1,160 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.

Israel's retaliatory military campaign to destroy Hamas has resulted in the deaths of at least 30,800 people in Gaza, the majority of them women and children, according to the territory's health ministry.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government is under immense domestic pressure to secure the return of hostages as part of any new truce deal with Hamas.

That pressure intensified after soldiers killed three hostages in December, mistakenly perceiving them as a threat.