Israel has been bombarding Gaza targets for days.
Palestinian territories:
As Gaza hospital morgues overflow with victims killed in the Israeli bombardment caused by a deadly Hamas attack, even an ice cream truck is being used to hold corpses before burial.
Israel has been shelling Gaza targets for days, trying to root out the enclave’s rulers, Hamas, after its militants breached the militarized border barrier on October 7 and killed more than 1,400 people in southern Israel.
Israeli airstrikes have claimed at least 2,750 lives in Gaza, where mortuaries with a capacity of only dozens of people are filling up faster than relatives can claim them.
In the parking lot of the hospital in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, a white truck covered in posters with popsicle sticks is full of corpses wrapped in white body bags.
Among them are several members of Talaat Abu Lashine’s family.
“At dawn, two shells fell on the house. There were 16 people at home, including eight children who were sleeping peacefully,” he said.
In Gaza City, a little further north, where tens of thousands of residents have heeded Israel’s warning to flee south ahead of an expected ground invasion, many bodies were simply left in the morgues.
“Given the large number of unclaimed martyrs in the mortuary of al-Shifa Hospital, the deterioration of the corpses and the continued arrival” of dozens of others, “a communal grave has been prepared to bury approximately 100” of them, Salama said. Maruf, head of the media office of the Hamas government that controls Gaza.
‘A lot of children’
Even body bags are now in short supply, says Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
“Every story that comes out of Gaza is about survival, despair and loss,” he said.
“Sometimes we don’t even have time to write down the names of the dead because there are just too many,” said Ihsan al-Natour, who works at a cemetery in Rafah in southern Gaza.
“There are many children among the martyrs,” he said, adding that “we bury three or four in each grave.”
Gaza’s Ministry of Religious Affairs has recommended using communal graves due to the large number of deaths and the shortage of cemeteries, as Islamic burial rituals also require burials to take place as quickly as possible.
Hamas, which has controlled the enclave since 2007, said on Monday there could be a thousand more bodies under the rubble and warned of the spread of disease.
In Rafah, residents prepared new graves by placing stones and tiles around mounds of freshly dug earth.
In one of them, three children’s bodies were piled on top of each other. There wasn’t enough room for them to rest separately.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
