RAFAH, 20 May 2004 — Doctors hastily stowed 22 Palestinian corpses in a grimy farm refrigerator yesterday after the Rafah refugee camp morgue overflowed with casualties from a massive Israeli army raid.
Rafah’s hospital was struggling to cope with a toll of at least 34 dead and scores wounded since Israeli armored forces sealed off the teeming camp on Tuesday.
“We were forced to do this because of the siege and lack of space in the main morgue,” said physician Manar Thhair, showing reporters 14 bodies laid out in two rows in the produce freezer on the ground floor of a residential block where he lives.
The Palestinian emergency services accused the Israeli army yesterday of blocking ambulances in the northern Gaza Strip from reaching Rafah.
“This is an absolute disaster. We sent ambulances to support Rafah but the Israleis are preventing them from reaching the place,” said Mohammed Salama, who is head of emergencies at the Palestinian Health Ministry.
The Physicians for Human Rights-Israel group confirmed that ambulances were unable to move south of the town of Khan Yunis to provide assistance to medics working in Rafah.
Eight more corpses were shunted from the morgue to the refrigerator after Israeli tank shells crashed into Palestinian demonstrators yesterday, killing at least 10 people.
The bodies were wrapped in white sheets or the vivid green flags of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas.
Scores of Palestinians queued at the site, where harvested vegetables and flowers are normally preserved for export, to look among the bodies for loved ones feared killed but still unaccounted for amid the chaos of the Israeli raid.
One middle-aged man came out weeping and sank to his knees. “It’s him, it’s him, it’s Mohammed (Tareq Mansour),” he wailed, referring to a 12-year-old boy.
A woman in the black chador robe of strict Muslims wept quietly as she waited in the queue.
“I’m trying to find my brother,” she said. “He went out to the demonstration. It was peaceful until the Israelis fired at them. Since then, I’ve had no information about him. I checked at Rafah hospital. Now I’m here. I’m afraid of what I’ll find.”
Thhair, a doctor at the hospital who arranged the emergency transfer of the bodies, described them as “the most beautiful flowers ever here, these bodies of ... martyrs”.
He used the Palestinians’ term for any compatriot, militant or civilian, killed during a 3 1/2-year-old uprising against the Israeli occupation.
Thhair said the corpses risked swiftly decomposing, posing a health danger, because of the stream of visitors requiring him constantly to open the fridge doors.
“Every time we do, the temperature starts rising again. It cannot go on much longer like this, much more than another day.”
Ali Thhair, a cousin, said the freezer could accommodate 45 bodies at a pinch. “We have another fridge available in case of a worse situation. But if electricity cuts out, we have a big problem,” he said.
The Israeli incursion caused some power outages.
