GAZA CITY: Rescue workers pulled dozen of bodies from the ruins in Gaza yesterday.
Ambulance driver Abed Sharafi has been at the grim task of looking for bodies since morning.
“We have pulled out the bodies of 15 children and women from under their house” along the road north from Gaza City to Beit Lahiya, he says.
“They were so badly decomposed that we couldn’t distinguish boys from girls. Some had been there for 15 days.”
More than 100 bodies have been recovered across Gaza since Israel ended its massive three-week-plus assault on Hamas on Sunday, giving rescue workers a chance to access areas where some of the fiercest clashes took place.
“There are so many,” Abed says. “Unfortunately we are not going to find them all.” Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, launched on Dec. 27 in response to rocket fire from Gaza, is the Jewish state’s deadliest on the Palestinian territory.
More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, including over 400 children and several hundred other civilians. More than 5,300 people have been wounded. Vast swathes of the coastal strip have been devastated.
But Hamas, which seized control of the territory in a June 2007 coup by ousting forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, yesterday again proclaimed it a victory for the Islamic Resistance Movement.
“The main aim of the war was to destroy Hamas and this resulted in crushing failure,” Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, said yesterday.
“What we lost during this war in terms of military capability is small and we managed to compensate for most of it even before the war ended.” On the ground in Gaza, residents scavenged for their belongings through the rubble that once used to be their homes. “We don’t have homes anymore. I don’t have anything anymore,” says Najette Manah, clutching a box of rice that she managed to find in the debris of her house in Beit Lahiya.
