GAZA, Tuesday, February 27, 2024 (WAFA) – In the Gaza Strip, the cemeteries have long ceased to accommodate people as a result of the Israeli ongoing bloodbath which so far has resulted in the killing of over 30,000 persons, the majority of whom are women and children.

Iman Musallam, a Palestinian teacher, said that she can hardly believe that this number of people killed due to the ongoing Israeli shelling occurred in less than five months since the beginning of the Israeli aggression on the seventh of last October.

Musallam who was displaced to a United Nations shelter in Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip, said, "The real number is much higher than that."

The Palestinian teacher said that the number of martyrs is likely much higher, with hundreds of bodies that still trapped under the rubble due to the continued Israeli bombing and the lack of equipment.

She added, "We do not know how much the number of martyrs will increase when the war ends."

In Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south, in Deir al-Balah and Beit Lahia in the centre, in Gaza City and Jabalia in the north, and other areas, there are hundreds of people who were killed and wounded in the ongoing Israeli airstrikes, artillery shelling, or sniper bullets.

Civilians, more than 1.8 million of whom have been displaced, said that “there is no safe place” in the Gaza Strip, and many said that they are “waiting for their turn.”

Families buried members of their family who were killed amidst harsh and unbearable conditions, Musallam added. 

She said that people transported the dead bodies from hospitals to cemeteries using small trucks or donkey carts due fuel shortage, 

The Israeli occupation forces exhumed graves and exhumed some bodies, under false “security” pretexts.

Last week, an Agence France-Presse photographer in Rafah, in the far south of the besieged Strip, saw a man carrying a body wrapped in a shroud, a scene repeated dozens of times a day coming from different areas in the Gaza Strip on the shroud, and it was written in black handwriting, “The martyr girl.”

Large parts of the Gaza Strip, which extends forty kilometers in length, with a total area of approximately 360 square kilometers, have been reduced to rubble as a result of the continuous Israeli bombing.

The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described the Gaza Strip as a "death zone."

Musallam described what is happening in the Gaza Strip as "the largest massacre in modern history."

She wonders, “What is our fault, we civilians, when our sons and daughters are killed?”

Y.S