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Depending on who you ask, the bones that have been sitting in a Tokyo repository for decades could be either leftovers from early 20th century anatomy classes, or the unburied and unidentified victims of one of the country’s most notorious war crimes.

A group of activists, historians and other experts who want the government to investigate links to wartime human germ warfare experiments met over the weekend to mark the 35th anniversary of their discovery and renew a call for an independent panel to examine the evidence.

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Japan’s government has long avoided discussing wartime atrocities, including the sexual abuse of Asian women known as “comfort women” and Korean forced laborers at Japanese mines and factories, often on grounds of lack of documentary proof. Japan has apologized for its aggression in Asia, but since the 2010s it has been repeatedly criticized in South Korea and China for backpedalling.

Around a dozen skulls, many with cuts, and parts of other skeletons were unearthed on July 22, 1989, during construction of a Health Ministry research institute at the site of the wartime Army Medical School. The school’s close ties to a germ and biological warfare unit led many to suspect that they could be the remains of a dark history that the Japanese government has never officially acknowledged.

Headquartered in then-Japanese-controlled northeast China, Unit 731 and several related units injected prisoners of war with typhus, cholera and other diseases, according to historians and former unit members. They also say the unit performed unnecessary amputations and organ removals on living people to practice surgery and froze prisoners to death in endurance tests. Japan’s government has acknowledged only that Unit 731 existed.

Top Unit 731 officials were not tried in postwar tribunals as the U.S. sought to get ahold of chemical warfare data, historians say, although lower-ranked officials were tried by Soviet tribunals. Some of the unit’s leaders became medical professors and pharmaceutical executives after the war.

A previous Health Ministry investigation said the bones couldn’t be linked to the unit, and concluded that the remains were most likely from bodies used in medical education or brought back from war zones for analysis, in a 2001 report based on questioning 290 people associated with the school.

It acknowledged that some interviewees drew connections to Unit 731. One said he saw a head in a barrel shipped from Manchuria, northern China, where the unit was based. Two others noted hearing about specimens from the unit being stored in a school building, but had not actually seen them. Others denied the link, saying the specimens could include those from the prewar era.

A 1992 anthropological analysis found that the bones came from at least 62 and possibly more than 100 different bodies, mostly adults from parts of Asia outside Japan. The holes and cuts found on some skulls were made after death, it said, but did not find evidence linking the bones to Unit 731.

But activists say that the government could do more to uncover the truth, including publishing full accounts of its interviews and conducting DNA testing.

Kazuyuki Kawamura, a former Shinjuku district assembly member who has devoted most of his career to resolving the bone mystery, recently obtained 400 pages of research materials from the 2001 report using freedom of information requests, and says it shows that the government “tactfully excluded” key information from witness accounts.

The newly published material doesn’t contain a smoking gun, but it includes vivid descriptions — the man who described seeing a head in a barrel also described helping to handle it and then running off to vomit — and comments from several witnesses who suggested that more forensic investigation might show a link to Unit 731.

“Our goal is to identify the bones and send them back to their families,” said Kawamura. The bones are virtually the only proof of what happened, he says. “We just want to find the truth.”

Health Ministry official Atsushi Akiyama said that witness accounts had already been analyzed and factored into the 2001 report, and the government’s position remains unchanged. A key missing link is documentary evidence, such as a label on a specimen container or official records, he said.

Documents, especially those involving Japan’s wartime atrocities, were carefully destroyed in the war’s closing days and finding new evidence for proof would be difficult.

Akiyama added that a lack of information about the bones would make DNA analysis difficult.

Hideo Shimizu, who was sent to Unit 731 in April 1945 at age 14 as lab technician and joined the meeting online from his home in Nagano, said he remembers seeing heads and body parts in formalin jars stored in a specimen room in the unit’s main building. One that struck him most was a dissected belly with a fetus inside. He was told they were “maruta” — logs — a term used for prisoners chosen for experiments.

Days before Japan’s Aug. 15, 1945 surrender, Shimizu was ordered to collect bones of prisoners’ bodies burned in a pit. He was then given a pistol and a packet of cyanide to kill himself if he was caught on his journey back to Japan.

He was ordered never to tell anyone about his Unit 731 experience, never contact his colleagues, and never seek a government or medical job.

Shimizu said he cannot tell if any specimen he saw at the 731 could be among the Shinjuku bones by looking at their photos, but that what he saw in Harbin should never be repeated. When he sees his great-grandchildren, he said, they remind him of that fetus he saw and the lives lost.

“I want younger people to understand the tragedy of war,” he said.

At least 10 people have been killed and 20 others wounded in a rocket attack on a football pitch in the town of the Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Israeli authorities said.

Israel’s military spokesman Daniel Hagari said children were among those killed and accused the Lebanese group Hezbollah of carrying out the attack on Saturday, but the group denied any involvement.

“Our intelligence is clear. Hezbollah is responsible for the killing of innocent children,” Hagari said.

“We will prepare for a response against Hezbollah … we will act,” he said.

Hezbollah swiftly denied responsibility for the attack on Saturday. The group said in a statement it “categorically denies the allegations reported by certain enemy media and various media platforms concerning the targeting of Majdal Shams”.

“The Islamic Resistance has no connection to this incident,” it said, referring to its military wing.

The Iran-aligned group has been exchanging fire with Israeli forces in areas near the Israel-Lebanon border since October 8, when Israel launched its war on Gaza.

The cross-border attacks, which Hezbollah said it launched in solidarity with the Palestinian people amid Israel’s war on Gaza, have led to fears of a larger regional conflagration.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he would fly home early from his trip to the United States, where he met several senior US officials.

“Immediately upon learning of the disaster in Majdal Shams, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed that his return to Israel be brought forward as quickly as possible,” Netanyahu’s office said in a post on X.

Lebanon’s government in a statement urged the “immediate cessation of hostilities on all fronts” and condemned attacks on civilians.

Fears of escalation

Reporting from Qatar, Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut said Saturday’s attack was one of the deadliest single incidents since the cross-border fire began and comes amid growing fears of an escalation.

“Hezbollah is saying this isn’t from them, whereas the Israelis immediately said it was them,” she said, adding that neither side wants an all-out war, “but both sides have said they are prepared for it.”

Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz warned that “now things can really get out of control”.

“It’s a dramatic moment. We don’t know what will be next. There is a lot of uncertainty. The coming hours will be decisive,” he told Al Jazeera.

“I don’t see Israel ignoring this incident.”

Political analyst Ori Goldberg said he believed it was unlikely the attack would lead to an “all-out war” between Israel and Hezbollah.

“Both sides don’t want an all-out war, this has been made abundantly clear”, he told Al Jazeera, and noted that the attack took place on Israel’s periphery, rather than in its heartland. “I don’t think that this will be enough to take us to an all-out war,” he said.

The attack on the football pitch followed an Israeli attack in Lebanon that killed four fighters on Saturday.

Two security sources in Lebanon said the four fighters killed in the Israeli attack on Kfar Kila in southern Lebanon were members of different armed groups, with at least one of them belonging to Hezbollah.

The Israeli military said its aircraft had targeted a military structure belonging to Hezbollah after identifying fighters entering the building.

Hezbollah claimed it carried out at least four attacks, including with Katyusha rockets, in retaliation for the Kfar Kila attacks.

The Golan Heights, a 1,200sq-kilometre (463sq-mile) plateau, is Syrian territory that Israel occupied in 1967 after the Six-Day War, before annexing it in 1981, a move the United Nations Security Council unanimously condemned.

Many residents in the territory are Syrian Druze, some of whom have Israeli citizenship.