She tries to move forward without blinking, trying in vain to hold back tears, the small body wrapped in a white sheet between her arms. At his feet, women are mourning their children, and a little further on, men are saying the funeral prayer.

At Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, after a week of truce between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas, the morgue is once again overflowing as Israeli fire from the air, sea and land is now focused on the city, AFP reported.

“My son Mohammed was trying to get the women and children out of our tent” from the makeshift camp set up at the school, Jumana Saeed told AFPTV.

“But a piece of shrapnel hit his head and it exploded… I could see his brain…” she continued before breaking down in tears.

The family has already left their home in the city of Gaza, in the north of the country,” this woman says. The Israeli army launched a ground operation there on October 27, 20 days after a deadly attack by Hamas Islamists on its territory.

After its tanks penetrated many areas of the city, the Israeli army ordered all residents of northern Gaza – about 1.1 million people – to leave.

Even today, according to the Israeli military and the Palestinian armed groups fighting against them, there is intense fighting on the ground.

“Why?”

“They were handing out leaflets that said ‘You will be safe in the south’, we went there and now my son is dead, my son Mohammed who was a boy,” she repeats like an eerie funeral litany.

Next to her, her daughter Joana is screaming, trembling in her dressing gown, talking to God and the people around her. She wants to understand.

“Why was my brother killed, who had nothing to do with the armed forces? What are these bombs that kill like this? What did we do? Are they really monitoring Hamas? What does this have to do with us?”, she wonders.

According to the Israeli authorities, on October 7, Hamas commandos killed 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians. Since then, the army has said it wants to “destroy” the movement in power in Gaza and launched an intense bombardment that stopped for only a week and which the Hamas government says has killed more than 15,000 people, including two-thirds of them women and children.

The men at Nasser Hospital — doctors, ambulance drivers and relatives — regularly carry out several bodies in white shrouds or body bags.

Families immediately rush to take a last look at their deceased loved ones. Some caress his hair, others want to touch the deceased’s hand for the last time, and still others kiss his face, sometimes bloodied.

For the residents of Gaza, these dead are “martyrs”, so there is no funerary purity for them: in Islam, the tradition says that on the Day of Judgment, the martyrs will be resurrected, and their blood will smell like musk.

Prayer for the dead

At this moment, everyone says goodbye to their “martyr”.

As for the bodies, some are carried on stretchers, while others are placed on the metal panels of cold storage rooms, which are practically unused due to the lack of electricity and the haste with which burials are now carried out.

The goal is to avoid the next airstrike, often without even waiting for loved ones who may have been displaced or cannot be reached due to poor telecommunications.

Despite this, everyone finds time to pray for the dead in the hospital yard, in front of the lined up corpses.

The man refuses to help. She holds her child tightly in her arms, wrapped in a white sheet, which she places in front of the praying people.

At the last appeal, he takes back the small body, which he handles very carefully.

Other families also rush to pick up the lifeless bodies of their loved ones and load them as best they can into civilian vehicles – ambulances are now only used for the living and wounded – and head for the now overcrowded cemeteries.

Behind them, several stretchers come out of the morgue door. Another tearful mother talks to her son, who was caught in a body bag. And a new prayer for the dead is being prepared. (AFP)