2023-12-02 10:44:15
He tries to move forward without blinking, trying in vain to hold back his tears, in his arms a small body wrapped in a white shroud. At its feet, women cry for their children and, a little further away, men perform the prayer for the dead.
At the Nasser hospital in Khan Younes, in the south of the Gaza Strip, following a week of truce between Israel and Palestinian Hamas, the morgue is once more clogged as Israeli fire comes from the air, the sea and the ground are now focused on the city.
“But a bomb shrapnel hit him in the head, it exploded… I saw his brain…,” she says once more, before bursting into tears.
Already, says this woman with a dark complexion, her face framed by a pink and blue veil, the family had left their house in the city of Gaza, in the north. This is where the Israeli army launched its ground operations on October 27, 20 days following the deadly attack by Islamist Hamas on its soil.
With its tanks entering many of the city’s neighborhoods, the Israeli army ordered all northern Gazans, 1.1 million people, to leave the area.
Even today, according to the propaganda of the Israeli army and the Palestinian armed groups which confront it, the fighting on the ground is intense.
“For what?”
“They threw out leaflets to tell us ‘You will be safe in the south’, we went there and there it was: my son died, my son Mohammed who was a nice boy and who listened to me when I wanted to empty my bag,” she repeats like a terrible funeral litany.
Next door, her daughter Joana screams, trembling in her red floral fleece bathrobe, speaking to God and the men around. She wants to understand.
“Why was my brother, who had nothing to do with armed groups, killed? What are these bombs that kill like that? What have we done? They want Hamas? How does this concern us?”
On October 7, Hamas commandos killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in Israel, according to Israeli authorities. Since then, the army has said it wants to “annihilate” the movement, in power in Gaza, and has launched intense bombings, which only stopped for a week and caused, according to the Hamas government, more than 15,000 deaths. two-thirds of women and children.
Regularly, the men at the Nasser hospital – doctors, paramedics and relatives – bring out several bodies together in shrouds or white body bags.
Immediately, families rush to have a last look at their deceased loved one. Some caress hair, others want to touch the hand of the deceased one last time, still others kiss faces, sometimes stained with blood.
Because for the Gazans, these dead are “martyrs”, therefore, for them, no mortuary toilet: in Islam, tradition has it that on the day of the last judgment, the martyrs will be resurrected and their blood will smell of musk .
Prayer of the dead
Then, everyone bids a final farewell to their “martyr”. A man even pulls out a relative’s white hair.
The bodies are sometimes transported on a stretcher, others on the metal plates of cold rooms, rooms which are now almost no longer used as electricity is rare and burials are now carried out in a hurry.
We must avoid the next strike and, often, without even waiting for loved ones who might be moved elsewhere or unreachable as telecommunications are poor.
Despite everything, everyone takes the time to perform the prayer for the dead in the hospital courtyard in front of the lined up bodies.
A man refuses to be helped. He holds his child tightly in his arms, wrapped in a white sheet which he places in front of the praying men.
At the last invocation, he takes back the small body which he handles with great care.
Other families are also rushing: they take the body of their loved one and load it as best they can into civilian cars, the ambulances only serve the living, injured, heading to the now saturated cemeteries.
Behind them, new stretchers come out through the morgue door. Another sobbing mother speaks to her son locked in a body bag. And a new prayer for the dead is being prepared.
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