Palestinian nurse Maha Sweylem came to the devastated shell of Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, hoping yet fearing news about her husband, whom she said was a doctor there.
Teams from the World Health Organization arrived at Gaza's main hospital on Monday to help identify the bodies lying in the ruins.
The Israeli army said it fought Palestinian Hamas operatives there last month during two weeks of heavy fighting, with the WHO saying patients were trapped inside.
Sweylem told AFP she had not seen her husband, Abdel Aziz Kali, since he was arrested by the Israeli army during the attack. She doesn't know if he's dead or alive.
The nurse recalled how the Israeli army quickly surrounded the hospital last month and then used loudspeakers to order “everyone to surrender.” Game over.' Then they started shooting at all the entrances so that no one could move.
“I spent four days there with my two daughters, without food or water. They were crying from hunger. When they arrested my husband, he had not eaten for three days,” she said.
AFP asked the Israeli military if they knew Kali's whereabouts, but there was no immediate response.
The Israeli military has long accused Hamas and Palestinian Hamas operatives of using hospitals and other medical facilities as shelters and command posts, and their patients as shields.
Motasem Salah, director of the Gaza Emergency Operations Center, said the scenes Monday at the sprawling medical center were “unbearable.”
“The stench of death is everywhere,” he said, as an excavator dug through the rubble and rescuers pulled decomposed bodies from the sand and ruins.
Salah said Gaza does not have the forensic experts needed to help identify the dead or determine what happened to them. So they rely on “the expertise of the WHO delegation and OCHA (the UN humanitarian agency).
They are trying to “identify the decomposed bodies and the crushed body parts” through wallets and documents, he said.
Relatives were also there “to determine the fate of their sons, whether they were killed, missing or driven south,” said Amjad Aliwa, the head of Al-Shifa's emergency department.
He said they wanted to “identify their sons and ensure they get a proper burial. However, we lack the necessary equipment and time is not on our side. We have to get the job done before the bodies disintegrate,” Aliwa told AFP .
'Partially buried, limbs visible'
Salah said the psychological impact of this “invisible” process on the families is unbearable, in another WHO video from the scene shared with AFP.
“Seeing their children as decomposing corpses and their bodies completely torn apart is a scene that cannot be described. There are no words.”
Several concerned family members walked among what the WHO said were “numerous shallow graves” outside the destroyed emergency department and administrative and surgical buildings.
“Many dead bodies were partially buried with visible limbs,” it said in a statement after its first visit to the site Friday.
“Protecting dignity, even in death, is an indispensable act of humanity,” the WHO stressed.
A “place where life was given is now a place that now only reminds us of death,” said Athanasios Gargavanis, the WHO surgeon who led her mission on Monday. “Hospitals should never be militarized.”
Over the past six months, Israel has ruthlessly bombed the besieged, densely populated Gaza Strip, killing at least 33,360 people, mostly women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-held area.
The Gaza war began after an unprecedented cross-border attack by Hamas fighters on October 7 that resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
AFP video footage from Al-Shifa on Monday showed the remains of several bodies recovered from one of the hospital's courtyards and placed in body bags.
For the son of one of the missing, Ghassan Riyadh Kanita, whose 83-year-old father Riyadh had taken refuge in hospital, the news was not good.
“My cousin called us and he told me that they found the body at the entrance of Al-Shifa. We came and they told us that they found the body.”
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