Bereaved Palestinians have reburied bodies exhumed from a cemetery in Gaza City, where the Israeli army has been leading a ground offensive against Hamas fighters since late October, an AFP video showed.

The footage from the cemetery in Al-Tuffah neighbourhood showed bodies wrapped in bags and laid out on mounds of soil. Other bodies were strewn around smashed-up graves, as a dozen men clad in masks worked with shovels to rebury them, the video showed.

Hamas on Saturday accused the Israeli military of “destroying 1,100 graves” at the cemetery and “stealing 150 bodies of recently buried martyrs”. When reached for comment by AFP, the Israeli army said they were checking the claims without elaborating further.

“We were surprised to see the bodies exhumed” on Saturday morning, said a local man surnamed Aliwa, who was among the people reburying the bodies. He declined to give his first name. Without offering evidence, he accused the Israeli army of “running over bodies” with a “bulldozer”.

Imprinted in the soil near the graves were what looked like track marks. “We are currently retrieving the corpses present in the cemetery,” he said, adding that only a “small number” of bodies had been identified.