He tries to walk forward without blinking, trying in vain to hold back his tears, in his arms a small body wrapped in a white shroud. At his feet, women cry for their children and a little further away, men pray for the dead.
At the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younes in the southern Gaza Strip, after a week of ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas, the morgue is once again clogged as Israeli fire comes from the air, the sea and the ground are now aimed at the city.
“My son Mohammed tried to take the women and children out of our tent,” Joumana Saïd told AFPTV in a makeshift camp set up in a school.
“But a bomb fragment hit him in the head, it exploded… I saw his brain…” she says again before bursting into tears.
The family has already left their home in the northern city of Gaza, says this woman with dark skin and a pink-blue veil on her face. The Israeli army launched its ground operations here on October 27, 20 days after the deadly attack by the Islamist Hamas on its soil.
With its tanks entering many areas of the city, the Israeli army ordered all Gazans in the north, 1.1 million people, to leave the area.
Today, according to propaganda from the Israeli army and the Palestinian armed groups opposing it, fighting on the ground is still fierce.
“For what?”
“They put out leaflets to tell us: ‘You will be safe in the south’, we went there and there it was: my son died, my son Mohammed, who was a nice boy and listened to me as I picked up my bag “I wanted to empty it,” she repeats like a terrible funeral litany.
Next door, her daughter Joana, shivering in her red floral fleece robe, screams and speaks to God and the men around her. She wants to understand.
“Why was my brother, who had nothing to do with armed groups, killed? What kind of bombs are these that kill like that? What did we do? Do you want Hamas? What does it matter to us?”
According to Israeli authorities, Hamas commandos killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in Israel on October 7. Since then, the army has said it wants to “destroy” the movement in power in Gaza and has launched heavy bombing campaigns that have stopped for just a week, leaving more than 15,000 women dead, according to the Hamas government and children.
Regularly, the men at Nasser Hospital – doctors, paramedics and relatives – bring out several bodies together in shrouds or white body bags.
The families immediately rush to take a last look at their deceased loved one. Some stroke hair, others want to touch the hand of the deceased one last time, others kiss faces, sometimes covered in blood.
For the residents of the Gaza Strip, these dead are “martyrs,” so there is no mortuary for them: In Islam it is said that the martyrs will rise on the Day of Judgment and their blood will smell of musk.
Prayer of the dead
Then everyone says a final goodbye to their “martyr”. One man even pulls out a relative’s white hair.
The bodies are sometimes transported on a stretcher, others on the metal plates of cold storage rooms, which are now almost out of use as electricity is scarce and burials are now carried out in a hurry.
We must avoid the next strike and often without even waiting for loved ones who could be moved elsewhere or are unreachable due to poor telecommunications.
Despite everything, everyone takes the time to say the funeral prayer in front of the corpses lined up in the hospital courtyard.
A man refuses to be helped. He holds his child tightly in his arms, wrapped in a white sheet, which he places in front of the praying men.
At the last invocation he takes back the little body, which he treats with the greatest care.
Other families are also in a hurry: They take the bodies of their loved ones and load them as best they can into civilian cars, the ambulances only treat the living and injured and drive to the now overcrowded cemeteries.
Behind them, new stretchers emerge through the morgue door. Another sobbing mother speaks to her son trapped in a body bag. And a new prayer for the dead is prepared.