The continuous Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip has leveled neighborhoods, killed at least 2,750 people and injured 9,700 others, the majority of them civilians, according to the latest tally of the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip.

In the southern Gaza Strip, graves are being dug up in preparation for filling, and in other areas, the bodies of the dead are being stored in ice cream coolers or buried in mass graves.

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Edited by| Christian Megan

 

Humanity  section -  CJ journalist

 

Gaza Strip - October,16,2023

 

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Outside Deir al-Balah hospital, a white truck dedicated to selling ice cream was converted into a place to store the bodies, in preparation for their delivery to the families before burial.

Talaat Abu Lashin, who came to collect the bodies of his family, said: "at dawn, two rockets landed on the family's House. There were 16 people, including 8 children. They were asleep".

To the north, in Gaza City, which has been heavily shelled and Israel has warned residents to evacuate their homes, many did not come to ask about the bodies of their relatives. The authorities resorted to burying them in mass graves.

"In light of the large number of martyrs inside the refrigerators of Shifa Hospital, whose relatives did not arrive for their burial as the signs of change began to appear on the bodies, and in light of the continued arrival of martyrs by dozens due to the massacres of the occupation, a mass grave has been prepared for the burial of about 100 martyrs in the emergency cemetery,"Salama Maarouf, head of the Hamas government information office in Gaza, said in a statement on Sunday.

In Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, Ihsan Al-Natour, a caretaker who works in a cemetery, is busy digging graves, saying, "we put three or four children in one grave".

"We suffer from the arrival of bodies very much, sometimes we don't have time to write down the names . We also get a lot of pieces and we don't know who, so we put them in a bag and bury them,"he said.

The commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said at a press conference that "every story from Gaza is about survival, despair and loss," warning that the Gaza Strip is starting to run out of even bags to put bodies in.

For its part, the Ministry of Awqaf in the Gaza Strip stressed in a statement that "the burial of the deceased should be expedited, especially in wars and disasters, and if the need or necessity arises to collect two and more in one grave, that's fine".

The ministry stressed that"in the reality of the Gaza Strip, it is most appropriate to bury the martyrs, especially their relatives, in one grave, because of the large number of martyrs, and the lack of graves intended for burial in light of wars and emergencies".

Hamas estimated the presence of "the bodies of more than 1,000 martyrs under the rubble of destroyed houses," warning of an "environmental disaster and the spread of epidemics due to the decomposition of the bodies of martyrs".