By Nadine Osman

London, (The Muslim News): A mass grave will be excavated inside the Al-Shifa Hospital on Saturday to bury 100 bodies lying in the hospital as Israel’s strikes around the hospital have not ceased for three consecutive nights, announced the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza.

Dr Munir Al-Borsh, Palestinian Health Ministry Director General, said that the Israeli bombing had impeded the entry or exit of ambulances to and from the hospital, essentially trapping people inside the Al-Shifa complex.

“There is very violent bombing almost every minute, with the aim of paving the way for entering the hospital’s complex,” said Dr Al-Borsh.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF), announcing on the X platform that “Over the last few hours, the attacks against Al-Shifa Hospital have dramatically intensified.”

“MSF staff at the hospital reported a catastrophic situation inside just a few hours ago,” it added.

For days, the Israeli army has been escalating its attacks against hospitals in the Gaza Strip, launching violent raids that led to deaths and injuries, in addition to great concern about the fate of the displaced people in those hospitals.

On Friday evening, Israeli aircraft intensified their attacks against hospitals in the Gaza Strip. They continued their raids in the vicinity of Al-Shifa Hospital, Indonesian Hospital, Al-Awda Hospital, Al-Quds Hospital, and Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital.

TRAUMA FOR A MASS GRAVE DIGGER

Grave digger Saadi Baraka, 63, spoke about his trauma triggered by the numerous mass graves he had to dig to bury mainly children and women.

Despite having spent his long grave-digging career, he claims his ordeal is “beyond compare” to anything he has seen before to the point that he can’t sleep or eat.

“We were forced to do this (mass graves). There is no place to accommodate these numbers of bodies every day, and there are no blocks (cement slabs placed on top of bodies in graves). Everything has run out in Gaza,” Baraka told Anadolu Agency.

“I have not seen, until today, such criminality against children, women, and the elderly, even in the Nazi regime they talk about,” he said.

“Yesterday, I buried almost 600 martyrs—more than I have buried in the past five years. I have not seen such brutality. The majority of those I buried were women and children,” he said.

According to Baraka, “each mass grave is about 6 metres (20 feet) in size, and around 45 people are buried in it. The largest mass grave accommodated 137 people.”

ISRAEL DOWNSIZES DEATH TOLL FROM OCT, 7 ATTACKS BY 200

Israel has launched relentless air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip, including hospitals, residences, and houses of worship, since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas on October 7.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry corrected the death toll Friday from attacks to 1,200 which was previously listed as 1,400.

In a statement in reaction to a decision Friday by UNESCO regarding the situation in the Gaza Strip in which it said that “the resolution totally ignores the October 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists, who brutally murdered about 1200 people in cold blood.”

At least 11,078 Palestinians have been killed, including 4,506 children and 3,027 women.

[Photo: People perform funeral prayer for Palestinians, killed in Israeli airstrikes, at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza on 11 11 23. Photojournalist Ashraf Amra /AA]