GAZA STRIP, Palestine
The bodies of dozens of unidentified people were buried on Wednesday in a mass grave at a cemetery in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Wrapped in blue tarpaulin, the
bodies were lowered on stretchers, some of them stained with blood, into a
sandy pit that was gradually enlarged by a digger. Some were the size of
children.
"As these martyrs had no
one to say goodbye to, we dug a mass grave to bury them. They are unknown
martyrs," Bassem Dababesh of the emergency committee at the religious
affairs ministry told AFP.
The remains, which bore only
numbers, had come from the Indonesian and Al-Shifa hospitals in the northern
Gaza Strip, according to members of the committee at the burial site.
The Indonesian hospital on the
edge of the Jabalia refugee camp, which had been hit by Israeli air strikes,
was partly evacuated on Monday, said Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesman for the
Hamas-controlled health ministry.
"There were bodies
everywhere. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed
it," said Umm Mohammed al-Ran, a woman evacuated from the Indonesian
hospital towards Rafah in the south.
"Wounded people died in
front of us as they bled out," she told AFP.
"The stench of death was
everywhere in the hospital. The wounded were crying out for painkillers, but
the doctors didn't have any to give them."
She held up her phone to show
a video she had taken. It showed worms crawling from the infected wound on a
patient's leg.
It's a similar situation at
the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, the territory's largest.
On November 14, that
hospital's director Mohammad Abu Salmiya said 179 bodies had been buried in a
mass grave inside the complex.
Among them were seven
premature babies who died because there was no electricity to power their
incubators.
The bodies that arrived at
Khan Yunis on Wednesday would have been "detained" by Israel before
being released after representations from "third countries and the United
Nations", according to the emergency committee at the religious affairs
ministry.
Khalil Siam, director of a
transport company, told AFP that the bodies had arrived the night before, and
it was not known "if they're decomposing or not".
AFP contacted the Israeli
military and several UN agencies operating in Gaza, but no reply had been
received late Wednesday.
There are thousands of dead in
the Gaza Strip, and the question of burials has shocked many Gazans.
Since the war began, war dead
have been buried hastily in private plots of land and even a football field,
when cemeteries are full or inaccessible because of the fighting.
A week after the war began,
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA),
said there was a shortage of body bags.
"Every story coming out
of Gaza is about survival, despair and loss," he said.
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