GAZA: Health officials in Gaza Strip have resorted to storing the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli air strikes in ice cream freezer trucks because moving them to hospitals is too risky and cemeteries are short of space.

The hospital morgue can only take 10 bodies, so we have brought in ice cream freezers from the ice cream factories in order to store the huge numbers of martyrs, said Dr Yasser Ali of the Shuhada Al Aqsa hospital in Deir Al-Balah.

The freezer trucks, whose sides still show advertising images of smiling children enjoying ice cream cones, are normally used to make deliveries to supermarkets. Now they are makeshift morgues for victims of Israeli aggression in Gaza.

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 being kept in tents too, said Ali, as he opened the doors of the freezers to show the white-shrouded bodies inside.

“The Gaza Strip is in crisis and if the unrest continues in this way we will not be able to bury the dead. The cemeteries are already full and we need new ones to bury the dead,” Ali said.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2023