Palestinian in northern Gaza says he buried 117 family members
A Palestinian man has said he buried 117 members of his family after they were killed in Israeli attacks on Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza.
The town has been under an Israeli siege and ground offensive for 27 days.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Mohammad Nabil Essa Baraka Abu Nasr explained that he is the sole adult survivor of his family, and that he was forced to retrieve and bury all his family members as civil defence teams could not access the area due to the intensity of Israeli bombardment.
“I had to retrieve the bodies of my family, uncles and my cousins. I recovered as many as I could, 117 family members,” he told Al Jazeera.
“We called on the civil defence team and medical services, but they told us that they were not allowed to move due to the heavy bombing.”
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Abu Nasr said that some other residents helped him recover the bodies, but that he documented his family members' names and buried them himself in two mass graves.
He added that 120-130 of his family members remain buried under rubble.
“I couldn’t get to them,” he said.
A 'disaster area'
On Monday, an Israeli strike targeted a five-storey building in Beit Lahia. The initial death toll was 93 people, including 25 children, according to Gaza’s government media office. Another 40 people were reported missing.
It is not clear whether Monday’s attack is the same one that targeted Abu Nasr’s family.
Local media reported that following the attack, wounded people were dying due to the lack of functional hospitals in north Gaza, a result of the systematic destruction of health services by Israeli forces.
Hussam Abu Safia, the director of the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital, which was the last operational hospital in north Gaza before Israeli forces raided it last week, said that they could not treat those wounded in the attack due to a lack of resources.
The Palestinian Civil Defence announced earlier in October that it had been forced to suspend its operations in northern Gaza as a result of Israeli attacks on its emergency teams, leaving the region without humanitarian services.
The Beit Lahia municipality declared the town a “disaster area” on Wednesday, due to the ongoing Israeli offensive on the town, part of its wider ground assault on northern Gaza which has choked off humanitarian access to the area.
In a statement on Wednesday, the municipality said the town is now without food, water, hospitals, doctors, services or telecommunications.
“We are sending a distress call to save what remains of the town being subjected to genocide,” the statement said.
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