Because transferring the remains of Palestinians killed in Israeli air strikes is too dangerous, and cemeteries are already congested, health authorities in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip have resorted to storing them in ice cream freezer trucks.
After Hamas conducted the bloodiest attack on Israel in decades, Israel responded with the most intense bombing of the Gaza Strip to date.
Dr. Yasser Ali of Deir Al-Balah’s Shuhada Al-Aqsa hospital revealed that because the hospital morgue only has space for ten bodies, they had to bring in ice cream freezers from adjacent ice cream firms to accommodate the enormous number of martyrs.
The freezer trucks are primarily used for supermarket deliveries and still have promotional graphics on their sides of joyful children licking ice cream cones. This disastrous conflict between Hamas and Israel’s army has transformed them into makeshift morgues.
On Sunday, the Israeli military indicated that inhabitants of Gaza will still be permitted to escape to the south ahead of an expected ground invasion in retaliation for Hamas terrorist strikes eight days ago that killed 1,300 Israelis.
According to reports, Israeli air strikes in Gaza have killed over 2,300 people, including a quarter-million children, and injured about 10,000 more. The growing number of injuries has put a strain on medical facilities, which are running critically low on supplies.
After Hamas terrorists attacked Israeli communities on October 7, killing people and kidnapping children, Israel swore to destroy the group. This means that the death toll in Gaza will rise dramatically.
“Even with these freezers, the number (of the dead) exceeds the capacity of this main morgue of the hospital, and alternative ones, and between 20 and 30 bodies are also kept in tents,” Ali said, exposing the bodies within the freezers.
There is a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and if the conflict continues, we will not even have time to bury the dead. Ali stated that there was a need for more burial sites because the present ones were full.
According to the head of the Government Media Office, Salama Marouf, mass graves were also being constructed in the Gaza City region.
He saw that “signs of change began to appear on the bodies” of the numerous martyrs whose relatives had yet to arrive to bury them in Al-Shifa Hospital’s morgues.
Because victims of the occupation’s killings continue to arrive by the hundreds, an emergency cemetery mass grave for 100 persons has been excavated.
