by Bassam Massoud and Maggie Fick
GAZA/LONDON (Reuters) – Name, sex, age, ID number: at the Nasser Hospital morgue in Khan Yunis in the south of the Gaza Strip, workers write down any basic information they need place on the corpses, wrapped in white cloth, of people killed in Israeli strikes.
The smell is nauseating. Some bodies, seriously mutilated, are barely recognizable. Only those who have been identified or requested by relatives can be buried and taken into account in the assessment of the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The other corpses are stored in the cold room of the morgue, often for weeks.
Since the Hamas attack in towns in southern Israel, which left 1,200 dead on October 7, around 20,000 people have been killed in the retaliatory offensive carried out by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, according to reports. authorities in the enclave, who estimate that thousands of additional people have died under the rubble of buildings destroyed by the bombings.
The Palestinian Health Ministry estimates that around 70% of those killed are women and children.
It is becoming more and more difficult to continue to count the victims, while most of the territory’s hospitals have been forced to close over the weeks of the Israeli offensive, hundreds of doctors and caregivers have been killed, and communications are disrupted by outages and power shortages.
Like other doctors and caregivers in Gaza, but also international researchers, activists and volunteers, employees of the Nasser Hospital morgue want to ensure that the increasingly deplorable conditions in the enclave do not prevent the count of victims.
“PSYCHOLOGICAL SHOCK”
Despite the shortage of water and food, the morgue staff – including volunteers – do not want to give up because it is important to count the number of Palestinians killed, underlines Hamad Hassan al Najjar, holding in his hand a small piece of paper on which information about a corpse appears.
The 42-year-old man highlights the trauma caused by his work in the morgue, describing being regularly shocked by the arrival of the mutilated corpse of a friend or relative.
Among the bodies transported to the morgue were that of its director, Said al Shorbaji, killed in early December in an Israeli airstrike, as well as several members of his family. “He was one of the pillars” of the Nasser hospital morgue, said Hamad Hassan al Najjar, his face marked with sadness and fatigue.
Without question, in his eyes, the most difficult task is dealing with the bodies of the children, some of whom have been dismembered. “It takes hours to regain psychological balance, to recover from the effects of such a shock.”
While the Israeli army has expressed regret over civilians killed since the start of the war, it blames Hamas, accusing the group controlling the Gaza Strip of sheltering in densely populated areas of the narrow territory, where live some 2.3 million inhabitants.
Israel repeats that it will stop its offensive only when it has eradicated Hamas, freed all the hostages and ensured that the Gaza Strip no longer represents a threat to its security.
Responding to a request for comment, an IDF spokesperson said the Israeli military “respects international law and takes possible precautions to limit civilian casualties.”
UN GUARANTEES PALESTINIAN MINISTRY DATA
The data collected by Hamad Hassan al Najjar and his colleagues is collated by employees of an information center set up at Nasser Hospital by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Ministry representatives left their offices at Al Chifa hospital, in the north of the Gaza Strip, following the ground operation carried out in mid-November by the Israeli army.
Ashraf al Qidra, a 50-year-old doctor who is the spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, communicates this data during press conferences or via social networks.
But the ministry says it has not been able, since the beginning of December, to regularly collect data from the morgues of hospitals in the north of the Gaza Strip, where the means of communication are out of service, as well as other infrastructures, due to Israeli raids.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), only six of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were able to accommodate patients this week. All are located in the south of the Palestinian enclave.
The UN agency says it believes that the Palestinian Health Ministry’s toll is lower than the actual number of victims, citing the absence of a count of bodies that were not taken to hospital or those that were not found. It is impossible at this time to determine the extent of the gap, according to the WHO and experts.
American President Joe Biden declared on October 25 that he had “no confidence” in the Palestinian data, while the Ministry of Health does not indicate in its report the cause of the deaths, nor whether they were civilians. or fighters.
CONTACT ALMOST LOST WITH GAZAWI HOSPITALS
Following the comments of the head of the White House, the Palestinian ministry published a 212-page report detailing the identity of the 7,028 people killed in the enclave between October 7 and 26. Since then, no such list has been reported, making efforts to corroborate recent data difficult.
However, the United Nations, which has worked for a long time with the Palestinian health authorities, continues to vouch for the reliability of this data.
The WHO noted that more civilians have been killed in Gaza since October 7 than in previous conflicts in the enclave, with a greater share of women and children among the victims.
Israeli officials said this month they believed the data released so far was generally accurate. Israeli authorities estimate that a third of those killed in Gaza are enemy combatants, without providing precise numbers.
Based in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which pays the ministry’s Gazan employees, said it had recently lost almost all contact with hospitals in the Gaza Strip. He also said he had no news of hundreds of caregivers arrested by Israeli security forces.
Asked about the arrests, the Israeli army said it had arrested some hospital staff based on intelligence that Hamas was using medical centers for its operations. Those not involved in these activities were released after questioning, she said, without disclosing the number of arrests.
INTERNATIONAL EFFORTS
Researchers, activists and volunteers around the world, including in Europe, the United States and India, are working to analyze data provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health to corroborate information on casualties and the number of civilians killed .
This work is largely based on the October 26 list which includes names, identity card numbers and other information on Palestinians killed since the start of the conflict. Some also “search” social networks to keep the reports made through this means.
The director of Airwars, an NGO affiliated with the communications department at Goldsmiths University in London, said that around 20 volunteers were working with NGO staff to compile information on war casualties, using social media and the Palestinian Ministry of Health document.
It would probably take a full year to complete this census even if the war ended tomorrow, Emily Tripp told Reuters.
“Civilians killed are displaced people, which makes them difficult to identify by neighbors,” she said. “Counting and identifying (the dead) is a really complicated process.”
(Reporting Bassam Massoud in Gaza and Maggie Fick in London, with Nidal Al-Mughrabi in Cairo, Ali Sawafta in Ramallah, Frank Jack Daniel and Dan Williams in Jerusalem, Jana Choukeir in Dubai and Emma Farge in Geneva; Jean Terzian for the French version , edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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