For ten days, Israeli air fighters have continued bombing Gaza without respite, levelling entire neighbourhoods to the ground and demolishing hundreds of houses on top of their civilian residents.
Hospitals in Gaza suffer from an acute shortage of refrigerators as the number of bodies requiring refrigerated storage spaces increases dramatically.
Even the roads to the cemeteries have been destroyed due to the unrelenting bombing that has been deliberately targeting Gaza’s infrastructure.
At least 2,750 Palestinians have been killed and 9,700 wounded in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said on Monday.
Palestinian health officials said that they have resorted to storing the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli bombing in ice cream freezers as hospitals and cemeteries are falling short on space.
A Palestinian youth is stretchered away after being pulled out from under the rubble of a building following an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, in the southern of Gaza Strip, on October 16, 2023.
“The hospital morgue can only take 10 bodies, so we have brought in ice-cream freezers from the ice cream factories to store the huge numbers of martyrs,” Dr. Yasser Ali of the Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah told Reuters.
Ali noted that even with the makeshift mobile morgues, Gaza will soon run out of means to transport the bodies of the dead.
In its last report on Gaza and the West Bank, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) affirmed that there were no longer enough body bags for the dead in Gaza.
The agency also issued a statement affirming that 2,329 Palestinians were killed in the first nine days of Israeli bombardment -- an average of 259 per day, or 11 every hour -- and that the number of killed is rapidly increasing.
Meanwhile, the head of the Hamas media office, Salama Marouf, revealed that dozens of unidentified bodies were buried in a mass grave after they were killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian relatives wait to collect bodies wrapped in funeral shrouds with their names written for identification, at a hospital following Israeli military attacks on Rafah, in the southern of Gaza Strip on October 16, 2023.
Marouf said during a press conference that these graves had to be dug as more and more unidentified bodies accumulated in the past ten days of Israel’s severe aggression against the civilians in Gaza.
He added that Hamas prepared a mass grave in the emergency cemetery to bury the unidentified bodies, stressing that the Ministries of Health, Religious Endowments, and Forensic Medicine have taken all the legal measures per Islamic law.
Islamic tradition stipulates that upon death, Muslims should not delay the performance of the funeral prayer or the burial of the dead.
The head of Hamas's media office pointed out that the victims were photographed, and their distinctive signs were documented so families who might have missing persons could check on them later.
The Director General of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, Mohammed Abu Salima, told Sky News Arabia that the mortuary “no longer has room to receive any new victims, given the large numbers that reach us daily in light of the continuous bombing.”
Al-Shifa Medical Complex is the largest hospital in the densely populated strip, serving more than a million people inside Gaza.
Palestinians mourn over the bodies of the people killed in the Israeli bombing in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Monday, Oct. 16, 2023.
Abu Salima added: "The refrigerators for the dead are full, and there is no place to put the new martyrs, so their families bury them immediately.”
Palestinians have been burying their continuously increasing number of casualties in ad hoc burial sites after it has become impossible to either reach the cemeteries or find enough plots to accommodate the ever-increasing number of bodies.
Israel has not contented itself with destroying the houses of civilians in Gaza but also cut off water, food, and electricity as part of collectively punishing Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
For ten days, the Palestinians in Gaza have remained without any means of survival, subjected to Israeli missiles that keep falling on Gaza round-the-clock, destroying hundreds of homes and leaving a million people without shelter.
A spokesperson for the interior ministry in Gaza stated that the situation has reached a critical point, with residents being compelled to consume unsafe water.
These dire conditions threaten to trigger a serious health crisis and put countless lives at risk, he said.
"The Gaza Strip is suffering from a very severe crisis in the availability of drinking water in light of the continued Israeli aggression," the spokesman emphasized, highlighting the urgent need for immediate intervention to address the escalating crisis.
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