Gaza City – Dozens of shrouded bodies lie on the ground outside al-Shifa hospital as a crowd gathers, ready to take them to their final resting place.
“We must honor the dead by burying them,” a man’s voice echoes on Sunday.
That day was different from the similar scene that repeats itself every day in this hospital.
Some shrouds are larger than others, not a sign of a larger deceased person, but because they contain the remains of several people. Many remains are partial.
There are around 62 Palestinians on the ground. They were killed in Israeli attacks but were either too disfigured to identify or were not claimed by anyone because their entire families were killed.
“We are burying in a mass grave dozens of bodies of unknown people who were killed in Israeli massacres,” said Salama Maarouf, head of the government media office in Gaza.
“We do not know their identity on this Earth, but they are known in the heavens,” he continued.
More than 8,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in Israeli attacks since October 7, including some 4,000 children and nearly 2,000 women.
The al-Shifa morgue has been packed since the first day of the attacks, as has a tent set up to accommodate even more bodies, Maarouf said. Volunteers come together to bury the unidentified people to give them dignity in death and to free up space as they expect more bodies to arrive.
The unidentified bodies arrived at the hospital after the Gaza Strip was plunged into a complete communications blackout on Friday, the night of the heaviest Israeli bombardment on the territory.
“Everyone who arrived at the hospital that night had been dismembered,” Maarouf said. “We buried six children together because their bodies were all cut into pieces. We gathered their remains and put them in a single shroud.
Maarouf said the internet and communications shutdown allows Israel to “hide its atrocities,” and described its air raids and accompanying actions against Palestinians as a “brutal holocaust.”
A quick prayer was said over the bodies before they were loaded onto the open beds of the vans for burial in the emergency cemetery.
“History will judge those who allowed this to happen to us and did nothing to help or stop this aggression,” Maarouf said.
