– We got here at five in the morning and started digging with simple tools. With hoe, shovel and axe, what we could get our hands on. With hand tools we dug up four, five bodies, says farmer Samy Al Khaled to SVT’s Middle East team on site in Izraa.
Soon the farmers realized that there were more bodies buried at the site and excavators were brought there to continue the work. 31 bodies were exhumed, but it is now believed that there may be even more.
According to Mahmoud Al Zoubi, a doctor at Izraa Hospital, several women and a child were among the dead. He also says that there are several different causes of death for the 31 people who have now been found.
– Four of them had been burned to death, which broke our hearts. It is impossible to describe the grief you see in a missing person’s brother or mother, and how they feel, he says.
Watch SVT’s Middle East correspondent Samir Abu Eid and people in Izraa talk about the mass graves discovered in the clip above.