In the morgue of the Nasser Hospital, in southern Gaza, workers wrap the corpses of people killed in Israeli airstrikes in white cloth amid the stench of death. They record whatever basic facts they can about the dead: name, identity card number, age, and sex.

According to Reuters, some of the bodies are badly mutilated. Only those that have been identified or claimed by relatives can go for burial and be included in the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll for the conflict. The rest are stored in the morgue’s refrigerator, often for weeks.

But with most hospitals across Gaza now closed, hundreds of doctors and other health workers killed, and communications hampered by lack of fuel and electricity, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to compile the casualty figures.

The workers, some of them volunteers, do not have enough food or water for their families, but they keep going because recording the number of Palestinians dying matters to them, said Hamad Hassan Al Najjar.

He said the psychological toll of the work was immense. Holding a piece of white paper with handwritten information about one of the dead, the 42-year-old said he was often shocked to find the badly damaged corpse of a friend or relative brought in.

The body of the morgue’s director, Saeed Al-Shorbaji, and those of several of his family members, arrived in early December, after they were killed in an Israeli airstrike, Al Najjar said.

“He was one of the pillars of this morgue,” said Al Najjar, his face worn with sadness and fatigue. Preparing the bodies of dead children, some of them missing heads or limbs, was the most painful task: “It takes you hours to recover your psychological balance, to recover from the effects of this shock.”