There is no more space in Gaza City’s largest hospital to store dead bodies.
Shifa Hospital’s morgue, which can only handle 30 bodies at a time, overflowed on Thursday.
Workers had to stack corpses three high outside the walk-in cooler and put dozens more, side by side, in the parking lot.
Some were placed in a tent, and others were sprawled on the cement, under the sun.
Nurse Abu Elias Shobaki said: “The body bags started and just kept coming and coming and now it’s a graveyard.
“I am emotionally, physically exhausted. I just have to stop myself from thinking about how much worse it will get.”
It is now the seventh day of Israel’s near-constant airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million people.
The relentless bombing is a response to Hamas militants brutally attacking Israel over the weekend, killing 1,300 people, injuring 3,000 and taking 97 hostages – according to Israeli authorities.
Gaza has been under an intense blockade ever since, with no access to supplies of food, water, electricity and fuel.
Spokesperson for its health ministry Ashraf al-Qidra said: “We are in a critical situation. Ambulances can’t get to the wounded, the wounded can’t get to intensive care, the dead can’t get to the morgue.”
Gaza’s sole power plant ran out of fuel on Wednesday. Shifa and other hospitals were desperately trying to save whatever diesel remained in their backup generators, turning off the lights in all hospital departments but the most essential — intensive care, operating rooms and oxygen stations.
Abu Selima, director of Shifa, said the last of the hospital’s fuel would run out in three or four days.
When that happens, “a disaster will occur within five minutes,” said Naser Bolbol, head of the hospital’s neonatal department, citing all the oxygen equipment keeping infants alive.
Hospital authorities said there wouldn’t be electricity left to refrigerate the dead, either.
Israel’s campaign on Gaza has levelled entire neighbourhoods, killing more than 1,530 people with more than 60% of them being women and children, according to the ministry.
The Israeli military says it is striking Hamas militant infrastructure and aims to avoid civilian casualties — a claim that Palestinians reject.
There have been multiple calls for humanitarian corridors to be established so people in Gaza can be provided with aid and safe escape routes.
The United Nations said it has been told by the Israeli military that 1.1 million people, around half of the Gaza Strip’s population, are advised to flee south in the next 24 hours.
Israel is expected to launch a ground offensive for the first time in nearly a decade.
