Gaza: AFP, dozens of unknown victims buried in a mass grave – Latest news
The bodies of dozens of unidentified people were buried in a mass grave at the Khan Yunis cemetery in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday, AFP reports.
Wrapped in blue sheets, the bodies were lowered on stretchers into a sand pit that was gradually widened by the 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 religious affairs ministry’s emergency committee told AFP.
The remains, which bore only numbers, came from Indonesian and al-Shifa hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip, according to cemetery committee members.
An Indonesian hospital on the edge of the Jabalia refugee camp, hit by Israeli airstrikes, was partially evacuated on Monday, said Ashraf al-Qudra, a 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 an Indonesian hospital in Rafah in the south.
“The injured bled to death in front of us,” he told AFP.
Israel reportedly “detained” the bodies that arrived in Khan Yunis on Wednesday before they were released after representatives of “third countries and the United Nations,” according to the Religious Affairs Ministry’s Emergency Committee.
Khalil Siam, director of the transport company, told AFP that the bodies had arrived the night before and it was not known “whether they are decomposing or not”.
Since the start of the war, Gaza’s dead have been hastily buried in private plots and even on a football pitch when cemeteries were full or unavailable due to the fighting.
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