Smoke billows after an Israeli air strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on 16 October 2023. The death toll from Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip has risen to around 2,750 since Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel last week, the Gaza health ministry said 16 October.
- Israeli airstrikes
targeting Hamas following a deadly attack have resulted in numerous casualties
in Gaza. - Mortuaries are quickly
filling up, exceeding their capacity, and even an ice-cream truck is being used
to hold corpses before burial. - Gaza’s ministry of
religious affairs recommended using common graves because of the lack of burial
space and the large number of deaths
As Gaza’s
hospital morgues overflow with victims killed in Israel’s bombardment triggered
by a deadly Hamas attack, even an ice-cream truck has been used to hold corpses
before their burial.
Israel has
been pounding Gaza targets for days, seeking to wipe out the enclave’s rulers
Hamas after its militants broke through the militarised border barrier on 7
October to kill more than 1 400 people in southern Israel.
Israel’s
air strikes have claimed at least 2 750 lives in Gaza, where mortuaries with
capacity only for dozens are filling up more quickly than relatives can claim
them.
At the
carpark of the hospital in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, a white truck covered
with posters of ice-cream sticks is now packed with corpses wrapped in white
body bags.
Among them
are multiple members of Talaat Abu Lashine’s family.
“Two
shells fell on the house at dawn. Sixteen people were at home, including eight
children who were sleeping peacefully,” he said.
In Gaza
City a little further north, from where tens of thousands of inhabitants have
heeded Israel’s warning to flee south ahead of an expected ground invasion,
many bodies were simply left behind in the mortuaries.
“Given
the large number of martyrs lying unclaimed in the morgue of al-Shifa hospital,
the deterioration of the corpses and the continued arrival” of dozens
more, “a common grave has been prepared to bury around 100” of them,
said Salama Maruf, head of the media bureau for the Hamas government that runs
Gaza.
‘Lots of children’
Even body
bags are now in short supply, said Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN
agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
“Every
story coming out of Gaza is about survival, despair and loss,” he said.
“Sometimes
we don’t even time to write the names” of the deceased, because there are
just too many of them, said Ihsan al-Natour, who works at a cemetery in
southern Gaza’s Rafah.
He said:
There are lots of children among the martyrs.
Adding that “we are
burying three or four in each grave.”
Gaza’s
ministry of religious affairs has recommended using common graves because of
the large numbers of deaths and a shortage of burial space, as Muslim funeral
rites also require burials to take place as quickly as possible.
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Hamas,
which has controlled the enclave since 2007, said Monday that 1 000 bodies
could be still under the rubble and warned of diseases spreading.
In Rafah,
residents readied new graves, placing bricks and tiles around mounds of freshly
dug earth.
In one of
them, three bodies of children were stacked on top of each other. There wasn’t
enough space to lay them to rest separately.