The bodies of dozens of unidentified people were buried on Wednesday in a mass grave in the Khan Yunis cemetery in the southern Gaza Strip, AFP reports. Wrapped in blue sheets, the bodies were lowered on stretchers into a sandy pit that was gradually widened by an excavator. Some were the size of a child. “Since 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 of the religious affairs ministry told AFP. The remains, which bore only numbers, came from Indonesian and al-Shifa hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip, according to members of the burial site committee. The Indonesian hospital on the edge of the Jabalia refugee camp, hit by Israeli airstrikes, was partially 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 Indonesian hospital to Rafah in the south. “The injured people bled to death in front of us,” she told AFP. The bodies arriving in Khan Yunis on Wednesday were reportedly “detained” by Israel before being released after representations from “third countries and the United Nations”, according to the emergency committee of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Khalil Siam, director of a transport company, told AFP that the bodies had arrived the night before and it was not known “whether they were decomposing or not”. Since the war began, the dead in Gaza have been hastily buried in private plots and even on a football pitch, when cemeteries were full or inaccessible due to the fighting.
2023-11-23 09:33:49
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