Medics bury 200 bodies at Al-Shifa Hospital, says doctor

Earlier we reported that 179 people had been buried in a mass grave

Now we've spoken to Dr Adnan al-Bursh from the hospital, who says 200 bodies have been buried in the hospital grounds.

It took around 100 of the hospital’s medical team six hours to bury the 200 bodies. “We started off at 08:30 in the morning and finished around 15:00 local time,” he says.

Al-Bursh, head of the orthopaedic surgery department, says bodies “have been left for days until decomposed” and so medics were left with little choice but to make a mass grave.

He says they “were not able to open the windows in the buildings because of the bad smell coming out of the courtyard” - adding that around 120 dead bodies were out there, before being buried.

Another 80 were in the morgue, he says, with mostly women and children among the dead.

The Red Cross warned the medics to leave them due to safety fears from ongoing shelling, "but we took the responsibility [to bury them],” Al-Bursh says.

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