Rabat – Upon discovering a new mass grave at the courtyard of Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s civil defense reported that it had exhumed 48 bodies on Thursday.
Relatives have managed to identify 38 of the unearthed bodies, thus finally being able to give their loved ones a proper burial, the tiniest right that the living owe their dead within the Palestinian and Muslim culture.
The 10 remaining unidentified bodies, however, were handed over to the forensic department at the ministry of health to be identified, according to the civil defense’s spokesperson, Mahmud Bassal.
Basal added that his team haven’t concluded their work at Al-Shifa, since 160 bodies are still buried within the complex This means that the exhumation process would take several more days.
A Gaza resident, Mohammed Abu Asi, spoke to AFP after he identified his late brother and came to collect his remains. “It’s like experiencing the war all over again. Recovering my brother’s body feels as though we are burying him today — the pain and the wound have reopened,” he said.
A mother, Suha al-Sharif, also came looking for her son’s body, hoping to identify him only by the clothes he was wearing when they last parted.
“I want to find him. I’m a mother — I am exhausted and do not know where my son is,” she said.
Al-Shifa Medical Complex, established in 1946 in the heart of Gaza city, was once the largest hospital in the enclave with a 722 bed capacity and 1754 employees. It’s destruction begun at the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, when Israel claimed that Hamas used the complex as a command center.
Despite having no concrete evidence of the claims, Israel continued targeting the hospital, starting by bombing ambulance convoys in front of the hospital in November 2023, then putting the complex under siege and causing it to go out of service within the same month.
Multiple mass graves were dug in the courtyard to bury the palestinian patients who died from Israeli attacks and lack of medical facilities, including premature babies whose lives ended because of the imposed electricity shortage.
Later in March 2024, after besieging the complex for the second time, the Israeli Occupation Forces stormed the specialised surgery building and reception departments. When the IOF left two weeks later, they left the hospital in ruins with mutilated bodies scattered around the hospital.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor reported that about 1,500 Palestinians were killed, injured or missing, with half of them women and children, as a result of the Israeli massacre in and around the Shifa compound.
