🛠️ Starve Them, Shoot Them, Bulldoze Them: CNN Documents Atrocities & Mass Graves in Gaza

A new CNN investigation shows Palestinians shot while trying to get flour, left to rot, and bulldozed into unmarked graves near an aid crossing.

Dec 03, 2025

Family,

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“Forgive me mom if anything happens to me.”

A young Palestinian man in Gaza named Ammar Wadi needed flour for his family.

Not a new car. Not a vacation. A bag of flour.

In June, he headed toward an aid truck near the Zikim crossing in northern Gaza — a place that had already become infamous for Israeli gunfire on people just trying to get food. Before he left, he changed the home screen on his phone to a message for his mother:

“Forgive me mom if anything happens to me. Whoever finds my phone, please tell my family that I love them so much.”

He went anyway.

He never came home.

Weeks later, someone found his phone and got it back to his family. The message reached them. His body did not.

Wadi is one of dozens of Palestinians who disappeared around Zikim this summer. Their families know they went out in the direction of the aid trucks. They know gunfire cracked across the sand. After that: nothing.

Now, a new investigation from CNN — led by Abeer Salman, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Thomas Bordeaux, Jeremy Diamond, Gianluca Mezzofiore, Lou Robinson and a whole team of reporters, analysts, and editors — has pulled together a mountain of evidence about what happened next. You can read their full piece here: Bulldozed corpses and unmarked graves.

What they found is not just a story about people killed in a food line. It’s a story about what happened to their bodies.

And it is one of the clearest, most chilling portraits yet of how Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza — not just in life, but in death.

The aid line that became a killing field

CNN’s team spent months reviewing hundreds of videos and photos from around Zikim; interviewing eyewitnesses, local aid truck drivers, and civil defense workers; speaking with IDF whistleblowers; and analyzing satellite imagery and audio.

Taken together, their findings show a pattern that is as simple as it is horrifying:

Palestinians, starving and desperate, gather along an aid route.
Israeli forces open fire from an established position as people try to get flour and flee.
The bodies of those killed are left where they fall, decomposing in the open, attacked by dogs.
Israeli bulldozers are then used to push corpses into sand, piling them with aid debris, or scraping the land into shallow, unmarked graves.

CNN geolocated videos from September 11th showing Palestinians running away from an aid truck near Zikim, sacks of flour on their backs, under a barrage of gunfire. At least one man appears to be shot from behind, with the bullets coming from the direction of an IDF firing position identified in satellite imagery. An audio forensics expert, Robert Maher of Montana State University, analyzed the sound and put the origin of the shots around 340 meters away — matching the distance to that Israeli position.

In another clip, people try to tend to the bodies of one man who seems dead and another who is badly wounded, as the gunfire continues over their heads.

The IDF’s response? The same line we’ve heard a thousand times: it “does not intentionally shoot at innocent civilians” and only fires “for warning purposes or to neutralize the threat.”

Somehow the “warning shots” keep landing in people’s backs.

“We were shocked by the scene.”

One of the most haunting pieces of CNN’s reporting comes from Gaza’s own civil defense workers and aid truck drivers.

Two eyewitnesses describe what happened on June 15th: an aid truck leaving Zikim is swarmed by starving Palestinians. Shortly thereafter, Israeli forces open fire toward the vehicle. People drop under the truck.

Because the area is so dangerous, an ambulance is only allowed in several days later.

“We were shocked by the scene,” one civil defense worker told CNN. The bodies they recovered were decomposed, clearly there for days. There were signs that dogs had eaten parts of them.

Videos from that area show an overturned, crushed aid truck surrounded by debris. Several decomposing bodies lie scattered around it, partially buried in sand, with a stray dog nearby. The civil defense team is able to retrieve 15 bodies. About 20 others are left behind because the ambulance is full.

Over and over, aid truck drivers describe the same reality:

“I see dead people every time I drive through Zikim… I watched Israeli bulldozers bury the dead bodies,” one says.
“Israeli army bulldozers either bury them or cover them with dirt,” another says.

Satellite imagery backs them up. On dates when crowds gathered along Gaza’s coastal Al-Rashid Street to wait for aid, you can see bulldozers appear the very next day. Areas that were packed with people are suddenly scraped flat. In one case, a bulldozer pushes a 30-square-meter patch of soil into a small pile in the same general area where a truck was overturned and bodies later discovered.

One eyewitness searching for his 17-year-old son describes stumbling on what looked like bulldozed corpses mixed in with aid boxes:

“They pile them on top of each other.”

Another driver calls Zikim “the Bermuda Triangle” — an area where people go and are simply never seen again.

A war on the dead

Under international humanitarian law, the rules around the dead are not vague.

Janina Dill, co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, explains that warring parties are supposed to cooperate to find, identify, and respectfully bury bodies in ways that allow families to know what happened and where their loved ones lie.

The point is simple and profoundly human:

To stop the dead from becoming “the missing.”
To give families a place to grieve.
To preserve the basic dignity of the person who once occupied that body.

Deliberately mishandling or mutilating bodies — bulldozing them, leaving them to rot in the open, letting dogs gnaw on them, burying them in unmarked pits without documentation — can amount to “outrages upon personal dignity”, which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

CNN’s reporting suggests that what has happened at Zikim is not an isolated failure of logistics; it’s part of a broader way of operating in Gaza.

One IDF whistleblower describes working at an outpost along the Netzarim Corridor in early 2024. Nine bodies of unarmed Palestinians were left to decompose around the base for nearly two days.

“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.”

Eventually, the commander tells D9 bulldozer operators to “cover up the bodies with sand.” No photos. No marking of the grave. No way for families to ever know where their loved ones ended up.

Another former IDF officer says he never received any guidance at all on how to treat the bodies of Palestinians killed in Gaza. When one body blocked a road, the command center simply decided to use a bulldozer to push it into a shallow grave by the side.

“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,” he says.

This matches what Palestinians on the ground have been screaming: from mass graves at Nasser Hospital, to cemeteries destroyed and unearthed by Israeli armor, to the bodies of aid workers killed and buried in the south — there is a pattern.

Gaza isn’t just a place where Palestinians are killed. It’s a place where the idea of Palestinian dignity in death is bulldozed.

What this does to families

For families like Ammar Wadi’s, the pain isn’t just that he’s gone. It’s that they can’t even know his fate, can’t bury him, can’t visit a grave, can’t perform janazah.

His mother, Nawal Musleh, tells CNN:

“When he comes to my mind, my eyes just cannot stop crying. We accept whatever God has written for us, but we just want to know what happened to our son.”

That line broke me.

As a Muslim, I know how deeply our tradition cares about how we treat the dead: washing the body, wrapping it with care, praying over it, returning it to the earth gently, knowing where our loved ones rest. It is one of the last gifts we can give each other in this world.

To starve a boy, shoot him while he’s trying to get flour, leave him in the open until he decomposes, and then push his body into the sand with a bulldozer — and never tell his family where — is not just a violation of law. It is a violation of everything that makes us human.

Even some Israelis are saying this. One soldier told CNN, “The families maybe don’t know what happened with their loved ones.” Another said they were given no guidance at all on treatment of bodies.

That’s not a glitch; that’s a choice.

Gaza as a test of what we’ll tolerate

I keep coming back to something historian Jean-Pierre Filiu said in another piece we discussed together: that Gaza has become a “laboratory of a post-UN world, of a post-Geneva convention world, of a post-declaration of human rights world.”

A place where the rules can be shredded in the open, where you can starve people, shoot them when they run toward food, bulldoze their bodies, destroy their cemeteries, and then get on TV and say you are operating within international law.

CNN’s investigation matters not because I believe CNN is suddenly radical. It matters because even within the boundaries of mainstream American media, the evidence is now overwhelming:

Israel has turned certain parts of Gaza into kill zones for aid seekers.
The bodies of those killed have been left, bulldozed, and buried without dignity or documentation.
Whistleblowers inside the IDF are confirming this.
Legal experts are saying out loud that these are likely war crimes.

If this doesn’t rise to the level where international courts, governments, and publics demand accountability, then the words “never again” need to be retired permanently.

Family, if this reporting gives you more clarity about what is actually happening in Gaza — not just to the living, but to the dead — and if my work helps connect those dots for you, I’m asking you to help me keep doing it. Please click here to become a member so that I can continue to tell these stories freely and fiercely, especially for the people in Gaza who can’t pay for any of this. And if you’re in a position to hold this up at a higher level, please click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.

Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

Don’t Stop Here

Don’t let this investigation be a thing you just read and then scroll past. If you can, take the next steps:

Read the full CNN piece yourself: Bulldozed corpses and unmarked graves and sit with the details.
Share this post with people who still think what’s happening in Gaza is just a “complicated conflict.”
Go back and read our recent pieces on:

Read, share, and talk about these things with your family, your community, your colleagues. Because the only thing worse than bulldozed bodies and unmarked graves is a world that shrugs and moves on.

The North Star with Shaun King

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