Palestinians unearth fresh wounds as Gaza's al-Shifa hospital burials are relocated

The courtyard of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza is once again filled with grief, as Palestinians gather around civil defense teams, searching for and identifying the remains of their loved ones. The brutality of the war is starkly evident here, with each family bearing immense pain.

Khaled Abu Asi is one of the many who came to find the remains of his loved ones. He told Middle East Eye that he came to find the body of his son, who died during the Gaza war in an Israeli attack on an aid convoy. "God chose him to be a martyr," the 60-year-old recalled of his son, Ibrahim, a medical student, who was tragically killed while trying to get flour for his family.

Abu Asi explained, "We had to bury our son in Al-Shifa Hospital because there were no available cemeteries." He also mentioned, "We couldn't bury him anywhere else – anyone who left the courtyard would be shot." This sense of despair and helplessness is heartbreaking. He sadly stated that the pain of losing a child is unforgettable, and the child will forever live in the parents' hearts, no matter how many years pass.

Approximately a year ago, the grounds of Al-Shifa Hospital were piled with the remains of hundreds of Palestinians who died in Israel's devastating war on Gaza, including a two-week siege of the medical facility. With limited cemetery space and overwhelmed morgues, many families were forced to dig makeshift graves in the hospital courtyard. During the attacks, some of the deceased were buried in mass graves by Israeli forces. When Israeli forces withdrew from Al-Shifa Hospital in early April 2024, they left behind destroyed buildings and piles of bodies. This largest medical facility in Palestine was reduced to ruins.

On Thursday, Gaza civil defense teams began transferring bodies from the hospital courtyard to city cemeteries, taking advantage of a fragile ceasefire agreement. During the excavation, many families of Palestinians who went missing or whose bodies were lost during the war also came to Al-Shifa Hospital. Soha Sharif, a mother searching for her son's remains, had tears in her eyes, hoping that her son had been buried during the Israeli siege. She was forced to flee to the southern Gaza Strip, leaving her son, Jihad's, body in the hospital's freezer.

Sharif painfully recalled the first attack on the hospital at the start of the war in November 2023, describing the indiscriminate bombing. "So many people were blown to pieces, many sacrificed, many went missing. These people are also considered unidentified because no one was able to bury their children." The mother who lost her beloved son comes here every day to look for her son's remains. "I call his name in the grave. I told him: 'Jihad, I am your mother... please get up. I am your mother. I will not leave you alone.'"

Sharif said with tears that she would find peace if she could retrieve her son's remains. "No mother wants to let her son leave her arms, but this is God's will... God chose him as a martyr. I just want to bury him with honor. I don't want to feel that no one came to find him and that he left this world alone."

Efforts to find remains have been ongoing since Israel's repeated attacks on Al-Shifa Hospital. However, many of the bodies found remain unidentified, some severely decomposed due to the area being bulldozed by Israeli forces. The Gaza Palestinian Civil Defense Department said on Thursday that, in cooperation with the Ministry of Health medical teams and the police, 48 bodies buried in the complex had been transported to official cemeteries for burial. Raed al-Dahshan, head of the Gaza Civil Defense Forces, said that among the excavated bodies, 38 had been identified by their families and would be buried in other cemeteries, while another 10 had been handed over to the Palestinian Ministry of Health's forensic department.

Dahshan pointed out that it would take several days to remove the bodies from the hospital, as there were nearly 160 in total. The Minister of Health urged families who were forced to bury their loved ones in the hospital to return and rebury them elsewhere. According to Al Jazeera, the hospital courtyard will be converted into a field hospital to treat the wounded in the collapsing medical system in the besieged enclave. Mohammed Mughayer, director of civil defense supplies, told Middle East Eye that the makeshift graves at Al-Shifa Hospital were among many created after Israeli forces bulldozed cemeteries in the surrounding area.

Mughayer estimated that a total of about 180 bodies were found within the hospital grounds, of which about 50 remain unidentified. He explained that several steps are being taken to document the remains, including issuing death certificates. For unidentified remains, efforts will continue to identify them, after which they will be buried in the al-Koraa cemetery. "Due to a lack of resources and capacity, we in the Civil Defense Department are facing enormous difficulties," Mughayer said, noting that specialized excavation tools are not allowed into Gaza.

"There are still 14,000 martyrs trapped under the rubble throughout the Gaza Strip, and we continue to work with simple manual tools." A United Nations report released in December 2024 highlighted that Israeli attacks on hospitals in Gaza, including Al-Shifa Hospital, were part of a "pattern of destruction" that severely weakened the healthcare system, rendering 22 of 38 hospitals inoperable. The report called for an independent investigation into these incidents and for accountability for violations of international law.