"We received 80 bodies inside 15 bags, with more than four martyrs in each bag, each wrapped in a single shroud", Civil Defence director Yamen Abu Suleiman told AFP.

Abu Suleiman said Israeli occupation authorities did not provide any information about the bodies, including their names or where they were  taken from.

"We do not know if they are martyrs or prisoners from (Israel's) jails", he added.

In a video released by the health ministry, men in hazmat suits could be seen inspecting the corpses wrapped in blue plastic sheeting, before unloading them from the shipping container they had arrived in.

The footage then showed the bodies being laid in a line for burial in a mass grave dug in the sand.

The bodies were later buried at the Turkish cemetery, near Khan Younis, the main city in the southern part of Gaza, AFP journalists said.

A mother's search
 

Salwa Karaz, a displaced woman from Gaza City in the north, told AFP that she had gone to the Turkish cemetery hoping to find her 32-year-old son Marwan, who went missing in January. He left behind an eight-month-old son.

"When we learned that 80 bodies had been handed over, we came to search in hopes of finding him among them", the 59-year-old told AFP.

"As of now, we have not learned anything," she lamented.

"We will try to identify him through his clothes. He was wearing brown pants, a navy blue shirt, a black jacket, and beige boots."

She last saw him leaving on his bicycle from their shelter in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza.

In a statement released Monday, Hamas said Israel's delivery of bodies without identities "exacerbates the suffering of the families of martyrs and the missing, who seek to know the fate of their abducted children or to bury their martyrs in a dignified manner".

The Israeli occupation army did not offer an immediate comment.

In December, Gaza government sources said Israel returned the bodies of 80 Palestinians killed in Gaza after taking them from morgues and graves to check there were no Israeli captives among them.

The bodies were then buried in Gaza, the sources added.

Israel has killed at least 39,623 people in Gaza, mostly women and children.