Middle East Crisis: Grim Task After Gaza Hospital Battle: Collecting Human Remains

But the battle in March reduced what was once the Gaza Strip’s largest health care facility to ruins. On Monday it was a scene of shattered concrete, buildings stripped of their facades, overturned cars and a half-crushed ambulance. In the air hung the stench of dead bodies.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, said on Tuesday that aid workers had found bodies covered by only rough plastic sheets or partially buried under mounds of dirt. He said they were making sure that bodies found at the hospital “were given fuller burials on site or at a nearby area.”

“When the dead are buried properly, they can be identified later with forensic examinations, giving loved ones some consolation,” Dr. Ghebreyesus said. “This war is a moral failure of humanity.”

ImageThe Israeli military returned to the hospital in March, saying remnants of Hamas’s military wing had regrouped there.Credit…Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

Israeli officials have said that their forces raided Al-Shifa last month because remnants of Hamas’s military wing had regrouped there after Israel’s withdrawal in January.

That reflects what some analysts have argued is a strategic failure: Israel has been unwilling to administer captured territory in Gaza, but has also been unwilling to turn it over to a non-Hamas Palestinian group. That has created the kind of power vacuum in which militant groups can thrive.

Gazan officials have said that hundreds of civilians were killed in the raid, an accusation that Israel has denied. It says the Israeli military killed about 200 fighters and captured 500 more. The New York Times has not been able to independently verify either account.

VideoThe hospital, which was the largest in Gaza, stood in ruins after a two-week raid by the Israeli military.CreditCredit…Maxar Technologies

In a video posted online by Dr. Ghebreyesus, aid workers can be seen picking through the rubble of the hospital and removing at least two bodies.

Dr. Mustasem Salah, a Gazan medical official, says in the video that identifications have been done in part by using wallets or other identifying possessions found on the bodies.

“The psychological impact of the scene on the families is unbearable,” he says. “Seeing their children as decomposing corpses, and their bodies completely torn apart, is a scene that cannot be described.”

Cease-fire talks are still sputtering, Hamas has dismissed the likelihood of a deal and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has doubled down on his vow to invade Rafah, the final stretch of the Gaza Strip that his military has yet to push into.

“We will complete the elimination of Hamas’s battalions, including in Rafah,” he said on Tuesday. “No force in the world will stop us.”

For weeks, allies and the international community have been warning Israel that a move into Rafah would result in a humanitarian calamity. But Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks to military recruits on Tuesday — a day after proclaiming “there is a date” for the planned Rafah invasion — made clear he remained undeterred.

Hamas, in a statement on the messaging app Telegram early Tuesday, said it was reviewing the latest cease-fire proposal, even though its demands had not been met. Egypt, Qatar and the United States have been mediating the negotiations.

Active fighting in the 140-square-mile enclave has ebbed to its lowest point since November. Israel withdrew troops from southern Gaza over the weekend, allowing some people to return to survey their homes in the southern city of Khan Younis, only to find much of it annihilated.

Analysts said the pullback of troops signaled a new phase of the war rather than the likelihood of an enduring cease-fire. Israeli leaders said the withdrawal was a result of their military’s achievements on the battlefield.

Eid al-Fitr, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, will begin in Gaza on Wednesday. Under normal circumstances it’s a holiday filled with family visits, new clothes and sweet treats.

ImagePalestinian women preparing traditional cookies for the end of Ramadan, in Deir al Balah, Gaza, on Monday.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But this year, Gazans are facing Eid under the pall of widespread hunger and extreme shortages of basic necessities, on top of the destruction and death that have touched all corners of the enclave in six months of war. During the month of Ramadan, about 2,000 people were killed in the fighting, bringing the toll to more than 33,000 lives lost since the war began on Oct. 7, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its statistics.

COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for coordinating aid deliveries into Gaza, said 419 trucks with humanitarian aid had entered the territory on Monday, the largest number since the outbreak of the conflict. Before the war, an average of 500 commercial and aid trucks entered each day, the level that aid agencies say is needed.

On Monday, the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and France urged an immediate cease-fire in Gaza in a joint opinion essay published in The Washington Post and other publications, citing the “catastrophic humanitarian suffering” and “intolerable human toll” brought on by the war.

King Abdullah II of Jordan, President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi of Egypt together called for a two-state solution for the Palestinians, saying it was the only credible path to peace, and warned Israel against invading Rafah.

“Such an offensive would only bring more death and suffering, heighten the risks and consequences of mass displacement of the people of Gaza and threaten regional escalation,” they wrote in the essay.

Cassandra Vinograd contributed reporting.

— Victoria Kim

“Germany firmly rejects Nicaragua’s accusations,” Tania von Uslar-Gleichen, an official at Germany’s Foreign Ministry and lead counsel in the case, told the 15-judge bench, adding that Nicaragua had “rushed this case to court on the basis of flimsiest evidence.”

On Monday, Nicaragua had argued that Germany was facilitating the commission of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza by providing Israel with military and financial aid, and it asked for emergency measures ordering the German government to halt its support. The court is expected to decide within weeks whether to issue emergency measures.

The proceedings, which concluded Tuesday, were the third time in recent months that the U.N. court — usually a sleepy venue for disputes between nations — became a forum for nations to put pressure on Israel and support Palestinians.

Earlier this year, the court heard arguments by South Africa that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and ordered the Israeli government to take steps to prevent such atrocities. The court has not ruled on whether genocide was in fact taking place, an allegation that Israel has strongly denied.

The latest case, brought by a Nicaraguan government that itself has been widely accused of repression and human rights violations, has placed a spotlight on Germany, Israel’s second-largest arms supplier after the United States. Germany’s leadership calls support for Israel a “Staatsräson,” a national reason for existence, as a way of atoning for the Holocaust.

But the mounting death toll and humanitarian crisis in Gaza have led some German officials to ask whether that backing has gone too far.

Lawyers for Germany urged the court to throw out the case. They argued that Germany has tried to balance the interests of both Israel and the Palestinians, and presented figures showing that Berlin was among the largest individual donors to the U.N. and other agencies that provide humanitarian aid to Gaza.

“Germany has always been a strong supporter of the rights of the Palestinian people,” Ms. von Uslar-Gleichen said. “This is, alongside Israel’s security, the second principle that has guided Germany’s response to the Middle East conflict in general, and to its current escalation in particular.”

In 2023, Germany approved arms exports to Israel valued at 326.5 million euros, or about $353.7 million, according to figures published by the economics ministry. That is roughly 10 times the sum approved the previous year.

Germany’s legal team argued on Tuesday that most of its exports were nonlethal support, such as protective gear, communications equipment and defense equipment against chemical hazards.

Christian Tams, a lawyer for Germany, denied Nicaragua’s claims that Berlin had increased weapons supplies to Israel since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. He argued that since then, Germany had approved four export licenses for military equipment, with three of the licenses for training and testing matériel not suitable for combat. The fourth license was for 3,000 portable antitank weapons.

Critics have said that there is little distinction between the types of weapons provided to Israel while it is at war. On Monday, Carlos Jose Arguello Gomez, Nicaragua’s ambassador to the Netherlands, told the court that “it does not matter if an artillery shell is delivered straight from Germany to an Israeli tank shelling a hospital” or goes to replenish Israel’s stockpiles.

Pieter D. Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks global arms exports, said the German position is in line with typical arms exports to Israel.

“While they don’t do the killing directly, they are an essential part of the overall system, the armed forces of a country, which actually make it possible to engage in warfare,” he said.

Lawyers say that Germany is an easier target for a suit than is the United States, by far Israel’s main military supporter. Germany has granted full jurisdiction to the International Court of Justice. But the United States denies its jurisdiction, except in cases where Washington explicitly gives its consent.

Israel’s agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories, known as COGAT, said 741 trucks of humanitarian aid had entered Gaza on Sunday and Monday combined, calling that an “unprecedented number.” On Tuesday, the agency said another 468 humanitarian aid trucks had crossed into Gaza.

But the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, gave a lower figure, saying its data showed that over Sunday and Monday, only 326 aid trucks had entered Gaza through the two main crossings. A spokeswoman for UNRWA, Juliette Touma, stood by the agency’s figures, which are published daily, and said she had no explanation for the discrepancy.

Before the war, about 500 commercial and aid trucks supplied the enclave each day.

Shimon Freedman, a spokesman for COGAT, said he had no comment on when the country would open two more ways for aid to reach Gaza, as it promised to do last week in response to pressure from President Biden: a crossing at Erez in the north, and the nearby Israeli port of Ashdod.

Lloyd J. Austin III, the U.S. defense secretary, again urged Israel on Monday to significantly increase the amount of aid that flows into Gaza. On Tuesday, the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, speaking at a news conference in Washington with the British foreign minister, said Israel had stepped up its aid to civilians in Gaza, with more than 400 trucks on Monday.

But Mr. Blinken warned that the increase in aid must be “sustained for as long as it takes to put in place something more permanent” after the war ends. He added the United States wants to see 350 trucks entering Gaza each day by later this week, a figure that is roughly triple the number that were entering each day earlier in the conflict.

Israel imposes stringent checks on incoming aid to keep out anything that might help Hamas, which it has pledged to eliminate. Humanitarian groups say this bottleneck, and a lack of security for aid convoys, have been the major barriers to distributing aid within Gaza.

But Israel says that there is no bottleneck, and that it is the fault of the U.N. and aid agencies if aid is not reaching people, because they are not providing it and handing it out quickly enough.

“The capabilities are there, so if they send more aid we are willing to inspect it and facilitate it into the Gaza Strip,” said Mr. Freedman.

UNRWA has consistently given lower figures than the Israeli authorities for the amount of aid reaching Gaza.

The situation for around 300,000 people living in northern Gaza was “definitely getting worse” because of a lack of aid, Ms. Touma said, blaming six months of Israeli restrictions. Israel’s decision to prevent UNRWA from delivering food to the north has not helped, she said.

Stefan Talmon, a professor of international law at the University of Bonn, said that the initial news that Nicaragua would take Germany to the U.N. court in The Hague “put the plight of the Palestinians more in the sight of ordinary Germans.” The case, he said, has provided a rare opportunity for some Germans to discuss their discomfort with the Israeli offensive, which Gazan health authorities say has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians.

Debate over Israel’s war in Gaza has long been muted in Germany, where support for Israel is seen as an inviolable part of the country’s atonement for the Holocaust. Analysts say that Germans have historically been reluctant to question their country’s support for Israel publicly lest they be accused of being antisemitic.

“There is always this concern over how not to slide into antisemitism, but there shouldn’t be this atmosphere where we can’t have this debate at all,” said Sudha David-Whilp, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. “This may not be unique to Germany but also many democracies who see a need to defend other democracies like Israel but at the same time want to make sure their values are respected.”

Still, it has been jarring for Germany to be taken to court to answer charges of abetting a genocide. German officials have long maintained that the country’s past crimes give it a special duty to protect against future genocides.

Although Germany strongly rejected the accusations from Nicaragua at the court on Tuesday, analysts say that the government is slowly toughening its stance toward Israel in any case, not because of the court case, but largely because of growing criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war from its main ally, the United States.

Some German news media said it was absurd that Germany should have to answer to accusations from Nicaragua, which is led by the President Daniel Ortega, an authoritarian whose government is widely accused of repression.

One opinion article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily newspaper noted that Mr. Ortega has often used heavy-handed tactics against perceived enemies. For instance, the newspaper said, Mr. Ortega shut down street celebrations of the victory of a Nicaraguan in the Miss Universe pageant over concerns that they could lead to a coup attempt.

“Ortega, of all people, now appears to want to campaign internationally for the observance of human rights,” the newspaper said.

— Erika Solomon reporting from Berlin

When asked if he would hold up the sale of the jets, he said, “I will make that determination once I see what those assurances are.”

If it goes forward, the order would be one of the largest weapons purchases by Israel from the United States in years, but the warplanes would not be delivered until 2029 at the earliest. Israel gets $3.8 billion each year from the U.S. government to buy American-made weapons and to bolster its missile defense systems because of a 10-year agreement that President Barack Obama approved in 2016.

The State Department gave two congressional committees, the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, informal notification of the F-15 order in January. In the informal review process, those committees can ask the department questions about how Israel intends to use the jets.

The State Department usually follows the procedure of getting approval from the top Republican and Democratic member on each committee, known as the “four corners,” before moving forward to formal notification to Congress of the sale.

Mr. Meeks is the top Democrat on the House committee, so his position on the jets is significant. The top Republican members on each committee gave their approvals in January. Mr. Meeks and Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, who is the top Democrat on the Senate committee, had not given their approvals as of last week.

Mr. Meeks spoke about his reluctance to give his approval for the first time on Tuesday.

“I take things very seriously,” he said, adding that he would review Israel’s assurances in a secure room where he can look at classified information.

“I want to make sure that death stops now and hostages come home now,” he said.

Some Democratic lawmakers as well as centrist and liberal former officials have been pressing President Biden to place tough conditions on weapons aid to Israel to get the Israeli military to curb civilian deaths in Gaza. The Israeli military has killed about 33,000 Palestinians there since the war began, according to the Gaza health ministry.

The war began after Hamas led a terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7 in which fighters killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, the Israelis say, and abducted about 240 others.

During the formal notification stage of an arms sale, Congress can block the sale by getting a supermajority to pass a joint resolution in both chambers, but that is extremely difficult to do, and the president could still veto the resolution.

— Edward Wong Reporting from Vienna

Turkey’s Trade Ministry said it was imposing restrictions covering dozens of exports — including aluminum, steel products, cement and jet fuel — after Israel denied a Turkish government request to airdrop humanitarian aid to Gaza.

“This decision will remain in place until Israel declares a cease-fire in Gaza and allows the flow of a sufficient amount of uninterrupted aid to the Gaza Strip,” the ministry said in a statement.

The announcement drew an angry response from Israel’s foreign minister, who accused Mr. Erdogan of “sacrificing the economic interests” of Turkey’s people in the name of supporting Hamas.

“Israel will not capitulate to violence and blackmail and will not overlook the unilateral violation of the trade agreements and will take parallel measures against Turkey that will harm the Turkish economy,” the minister, Israel Katz, said in a statement.

Turkey’s exports to Israel were worth $5.4 billion in 2023, or 2.1 percent of its total exports, according to official data.

Turkey has long had turbulent relations with Israel, though in recent years there had been some signs of a thaw: In 2022, Turkey welcomed Israel’s president to Ankara, the first visit by an Israeli head of state since 2008. Mr. Erdogan met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for the first time last September.

Less than a month after that meeting, Hamas led the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza.

Under Mr. Erdogan, Turkey has often hosted members of Hamas, some of whose leaders were in the country for meetings on Oct. 7. The Turkish leader has strongly criticized Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, putting him sharply at odds with his NATO allies.

But the rising death toll and dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza have prompted increasing criticism from Israel’s allies over how the war is being conducted.

President Biden threatened last week to condition future U.S. support for Israel on how it addresses his concerns about civilian casualties and the humanitarian crisis. This week, the foreign minister of France told French news media that imposing sanctions might be one way of putting more pressure on Israel to open humanitarian corridors to Gaza.

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.

— Cassandra Vinograd reporting from Jerusalem

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Republican, asked Mr. Austin to address the protesters’ concerns.

“Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?” Mr. Cotton asked.

“We don’t have any evidence of genocide being created,” Mr. Austin replied.

“So that’s a no?” asked Mr. Cotton. “Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza?”

“We don’t have evidence of that, to my knowledge,” the defense secretary answered.

South Africa has brought a suit before the International Court of Justice contending that the Israeli military campaign in Gaza amounts to genocide, an accusation that Israel vehemently denies.

The court issued an interim ruling that Israel must take actions to prevent acts by its forces in Gaza that are banned under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The prohibited actions include indiscriminately killing Palestinians and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Critics who contend that the campaign is genocidal accuse Israel of indiscriminate bombings that have leveled civilian apartment blocks, public buildings and mosques. Many of the dead were women and children. They have also accused Israel of using hunger as a weapon by restricting the aid entering Gaza.

Israel has argued that its bombing campaign has been aimed at military targets, accusing Hamas of using civilians as shields. The Israeli military says Hamas has built hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath the heavily populated enclave’s buildings.

Israeli officials also deny they have unduly restricted the aid coming into the country and have accused United Nations agencies and other aid organizations of being inefficient in distributing assistance.

ImageProtesters blocked a cafeteria for senators on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.Credit…Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

The hearing room was not the only scene of protest on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. The police arrested around 50 people who briefly shut down a cafeteria for senators, their aides and visitors to the Capitol.

Dozens of protesters, including clergy members and laypeople from different Christian denominations, peacefully occupied the cafeteria at peak lunch hour, chanting and singing to demand a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and an end to U.S. arms transfers to Israel.

“The Senate and their staffers cannot eat until Gaza eats,” the protest’s organizers, led by Christians for a Free Palestine, declared.

The Capitol Police blocked off the cafeteria for around 30 minutes as it was cleared out. Staff members having lunch crowded into a nearby seating area, and then quickly returned to the cafeteria when it was reopened.

Kayla Guo contributed reporting.

— John Ismay Reporting from Washington

The United Nations has warned that the food shortages in Gaza have become severe enough to risk famine there soon.

Mr. Blinken offered no new detail about the international talks aimed at reaching a cease-fire tied to the release of Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza. But he suggested that Hamas should be facing more pressure to accept an Israeli offer now on the table.

Hamas’s willingness to allow the conflict to continue, he said, “is a reflection of what it really thinks about the people of Gaza, which is not much at all.”

Noting that the Hamas militant group set off the Israeli invasion with its Oct. 7 attack, Mr. Blinken said, “It’s also extraordinary the sense in which Hamas has been almost erased from this story.”

He said he understood the anger at Israel over its devastating military offensive, which has left much of Gaza in ruins and has killed about 33,000 people, most of them civilians. But, he said, the attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage, deserves condemnation as well.

“It would also be important that so much of the understandable passion, outrage and anger directed at Israel for the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza — that some of that might also be reserved and directed for Hamas,” Mr. Blinken said.