Health officials in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip have resorted to storing the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes in ice cream freezer trucks because transporting them to hospitals is too risky and cemeteries are short on space.
Israel has unleashed the fiercest bombardment of all time on the Gaza Strip in response to the Palestinian militia Hamas, after this organization carried out the deadliest attack against Israel in decades.
“The hospital morgue can only hold ten bodies, so we have brought ice cream freezers from ice cream factories to store a large number of martyrs,” said Dr. Yasser Ali of Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah. .
Freezer trucks, whose sides still display advertising images of smiling children enjoying ice cream cones and popsicles, are typically used to make deliveries to supermarkets. They are now makeshift morgues for victims of the devastating war between Hamas and the Hebrew army.
The Israeli military said Sunday it would still allow Gazans to evacuate south ahead of an expected ground attack in retaliation for attacks nine days ago by Hamas gunmen that killed 1,300 people in Israel.
Gaza authorities said Israeli airstrikes had killed more than 2,300 people, a quarter of them children, and nearly 10,000 had been wounded so far. Hospitals are running out of supplies and struggling to cope with a growing number of injured people.
Israel has vowed to annihilate Hamas after its fighters rampaged through Israeli towns on Oct. 7, shooting men, women and children and taking hostages. That means the death toll in Gaza will rise dramatically.
“Even with these freezers, the number (of dead) exceeds the capacity of this main hospital morgue and other alternatives, and between 20 and 30 corpses are also kept in tents,” said Ali, while opening the doors of the freezers to show the bodies wrapped in white inside.
“The Gaza Strip is in crisis and if the war continues in this way we will not be able to bury the dead. The cemeteries are already full and we need new ones to bury the dead,” added Dr Ali.
Also in Gaza City, authorities are preparing mass graves, said the head of the Government Media Office, Salama Marouf.
“In light of the large number of martyrs inside the morgues of Al-Shifa hospital, whose relatives did not arrive to bury them, signs of change began to appear in the bodies,” the doctor added.
“And in light of the continued arrival of dozens of martyrs as a result of the occupation massacres, a mass grave has been prepared to bury approximately one hundred martyrs in the emergency cemetery,” he concluded.
