Palestinians 'dig mass graves' at Gaza hospital

Palestinians trapped inside Gaza’s biggest hospital are digging mass graves, with no means of keeping corpses from decomposing due to Israel’s siege, an official there says. 

- Bethan McKernan , Oliver Holmes

“We are planning to bury them today in a mass grave inside al-Shifa medical complex,” said a health ministry spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qidra. “The men are digging right now as we speak.”

With Israeli forces at the gates of the complex, and fighting raging with Hamas militants in the streets of Gaza City, patients have been dying owing to energy shortages and dwindling supplies. Some of the hospital’s buildings have been bombed.

The Biden administration said on Tuesday that US intelligence supported Israel claims that Hamas was using al-Shifa as a military command centre and probably as a weapons store too.

“We have information that confirms that Hamas is using that particular hospital for a command and control mode” the White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters aboard Air Force One. “That is a war crime.”

But Kirby added that the actions of Hamas did not diminish Israel’s responsibility to protect civilians in the course of its military operations.

At least 32 patients, including three premature babies, died at the weekend, the health ministry in Gaza said, and another 36 babies and other patients at al-Shifa were at risk. Life-saving equipment, such as incubators, cannot function without fuel to run generators.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) said on Tuesday that more than 200,000 people had fled northern Gaza in the past 10 days.

It said only one hospital in the northern half of the blockaded Gaza Strip – al-Awda – still had electricity and was able to receive patients, with other medical facilities in sprawling Gaza City now mostly functioning as shelters for people fleeing the violence.