At least 179 patients, including children, who died in the intensive care unit of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza were buried in a mass grave at the premises, the hospital’s director Mohammad Abu Salmiyah said on Tuesday (Nov 14).
“We were forced to bury them in a mass grave. There are bodies littered in the hospital complex and there is no longer electricity at the morgues,” Salmiyah said, according to AFP news agency.
He added that seven babies and 29 intensive care patients were among those buried after hospital fuel supplies ran out due to the intense fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Life-saving equipment such as incubators cannot run without fuel to run generators.
Dead bodies’ stench permeates hospital
A man and a woman died in the intensive care unit, bringing the number of people who had died there to 29, Salmiyah said.
A journalist associated with AFP claimed that the whole facility reeked of decomposing bodies.
But he said nighttime fighting and air strikes from Monday into Tuesday had been less intense than previous nights.
The fighting outside the hospital came after Israeli tanks amassed there in a bid to wipe out Hamas which, Israel claims, is used as an underground command “node”— a charge denied by the Palestinian militant group.
The World Health Organisation posted on X on Sunday that there are between 600 and 650 inpatients at al-Shifa, as well as 200 to 500 health workers, and about 1,500 displaced people seeking shelter there.
The Israeli military claimed that they are providing safe corridors for people to escape intense fighting in the north and move south, but Palestinian officials inside al-Shifa said the complex was surrounded by constant heavy gunfire and that Israeli snipers were all around.
Significance of the hospital
Israel believes that Al-Shifa hospital acts as the nerve Centre of Hamas’ administrative and military capabilities.
But for the Palestinian group, it has become a symbol of the organisation’s ability to fight against a militarily more powerful foe
Till now more than 11,000 people, about 40 per cent of them children, have been killed, Palestinian authorities say, while more than half of the population of Gaza have been rendered homeless.