UN aid chief expresses shock at seeing dogs fattened from eating corpses in Gaza
Tom Fletcher, the head of the UN’s humanitarian affairs bureau, has spoken to reporters about what he witnessed in Gaza during a recent visit.
“It was much, much worse than I’d anticipated, and I’d really prepared myself for the worst,” he said.
“The devastation, the desolation in northern Gaza is even greater there than it is in the south, and for miles and miles, it’s just rubble. My staff were trying to find a way back to their homes, using GPS, because there were no landmarks to navigate by. You couldn’t see what was a school, what was hospital, what was a home,” he told reporters.
“One of the first shocking things I saw driving in is the dogs going through the rubble. And I said to my colleague who was with me, why are the dogs so fat? And he said, well, because the dogs are looking for corpses. And you notice that the people are thin, and then you see that for miles and miles and miles.”
As we reported earlier, Fletcher also called on Israel to end its punishing blockade on Gaza, saying supplies of aid are at risk of running out “very, very fast”.
“The fact that we’re not getting fuel in means that incubators are being switched off,” he added.
Palestinians resume search for buried bodies at al-Shifa Hospital
It has been an emotionally exhausting moment for many people who ended up burying their loved ones here when Israeli forces laid siege to al-Shifa Hospital and then stormed it and killed many people.
There are nearly 100 graves here.
This used to be the back yard of the hospital and it served largely as a parking lot before being turned into a graveyard.
Some of the graves contain more than one body, as families had to bury their loved ones quickly because of the snipers that were stationed around the hospital.
Over the past hour, many family members have arrived here, digging for the bodies of their loved ones buried here. These are the families who were able to identify the graves because of the markers they left behind.
However, many of the graves do not have these signs. They remain unidentified, believed to contain victims whose families were either killed and did not have anyone to bury them. Or they were buried by health officials and volunteers.
For many families here, this is an agonising time. Some still don’t know if their loved ones were killed, detained by the Israeli military, or taken from evacuation centres or their homes in northern Gaza. Over the past month, they have searched across the Strip, hoping to find answers since the ceasefire began.
Civil defence crews recover 48 bodies from Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital for proper burial
Gaza’s civil defence now says 48 bodies have been recovered and are being transported for proper burial. According to civil defence officials, 38 of the bodies have been identified with the help of relatives, while 10 remain unidentified.
The director of civil defence stated that clearing all the bodies found at the hospital – approximately 160 – will take several days.
Israel holding on to the bodies of 676 dead Palestinians, group says
The National Campaign to Retrieve Martyrs’ Bodies, a Palestinian advocacy group, says Israel is retaining the bodies of 676 Palestinians in freezers and military burial sites, known as “cemeteries of numbers”.
The number rose this week after the Israeli military took the bodies of three Palestinian men it killed in Jenin in the occupied West Bank early on Tuesday.
The withheld bodies include those of 60 children and nine women, according to the group.
For decades, Israel has been taking the dead bodies of suspected Palestinian fighters to use as a bargaining chip.
Last week, Trump slammed Hamas for holding on to the bodies of Israelis after the October 7, 2023 attack. “Only sick and twisted people keep bodies, and you are sick and twisted,” the US president wrote in a social media post.
