Gaza's embattled main hospital buries patients in mass grave

GAZA STRIP, Occupied Palestine — Gaza's main hospital has been forced to bury scores of dead patients in a mass grave, its director said on Tuesday, as US President Joe Biden pressed Israel to protect the complex.

Israeli forces were at the gates of the sprawling Al Shifa hospital as doctors say thousands of people are stranded inside in horrific conditions.

"There are bodies littered in the hospital complex and there is no longer electricity at the morgues," said Al Shifa hospital director Mohammad Abu Salmiyah, adding that 179 bodies had been interred so far.

"We were forced to bury them in a mass grave," he said, adding that seven babies and 29 intensive care patients were among those who had died after fuel for the hospital's generator ran out.

A witness said the smell of decomposing bodies was everywhere in the facility, but nighttime fighting and air strikes had been less intense compared to previous nights.

The United Nations believes that thousands, and perhaps more than 10,000 people, patients, staff and displaced civilians, may be inside and unable to escape because of fierce fighting nearby.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says Israel’s relentless assault has killed 11,240 people, also mostly civilians, including thousands of children.

Biden called on Israel to use “less intrusive action relative to the hospital”, some of his most pointed comments on Israeli operations to date.

“The hospital must be protected,” he told reporters, as international outrage builds over the death and suffering the war has inflicted on Gaza civilians.

Israel’s top diplomat acknowledged on Monday that his nation has “two or three weeks until international pressure really steps up”.

Quoted by his spokesman, Foreign Minister Eli Cohen added that Israel is working to “broaden the window of legitimacy, and the fighting will carry on for as long as necessary”.

 ‘We are civilians’ 

Israel’s massive response have sparked protests around the world, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets in the Middle East, Europe and beyond.

Israel’s critics point to the toll of a blockade and near-relentless bombing campaign on long-suffering civilians in Gaza.

International aid agencies speak of hundreds of thousands of people displaced and a rolling humanitarian catastrophe.

Israel has urged Palestinians to flee south from the heavy combat in the north of the besieged territory, and has agreed to daily pauses in military operations around specified “corridors” to allow the passage of fleeing civilians.

But escaping the fighting is dangerous and wounded Palestinians told AFP how they were hit by a strike on their way south.

“I walked around 3 to 4 kilometres  while I was bleeding,” said Hasan Baker, whose head and left hand were bandaged. “There was no possibility for any ambulance to enter the area.

“We didn’t have any weapons,” he added. “We are civilians, we were moving from one place to another according to the instructions of the [Israeli] occupation.”

The war in Gaza has also spurred violence on other fronts.

In the occupied West Bank, eight Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli troops, seven during an army raid on the northern city of Tulkarem and one near the southern city of Hebron, the Palestinian health ministry said on Tuesday.

After repeated attacks on US forces in the Middle East, the United States launched air strikes that killed at least eight pro-Iran fighters in eastern Syria, a Britain-based monitoring group said.

On Monday, Israel used fighter jets to strike what it said were “operational command centres” belonging to Iran-backed militant group Hizbollah inside Lebanon.