The photographs were taken at Khan Younis zoo in the impoverished Gaza Strip. The animals were left without food due to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, as staff were unable to feed or care for them properly.

Mohammed Awaida opened South Forest Park in 2007 and invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into the zoo.

He lost a number of animals during the Israeli attacks against Hamas which began a year later.

During the three-week offensive, launched in response to rocket attacks on Israel, Awaida said he could not reach the zoo, and many animals died of neglect and starvation.

History repeated itself in summer 2014, in the aftermath of the Gaza war known as Operation Protective Edge.

The fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants killed more than 1,960 Palestinians and 67 people on the Israeli side.

It also left 80 animals dead and only 20 survivors in the Al-Bisan zoo in Beit Lahia.

Khan Younis is one of five zoos in the Gaza Strip, a densely populated coastal enclave of 1.7million people ruled by Islamic Hamas militants.

With no government body in Gaza that oversees zoos, and no animal rights movement in the region, the Khan Younis facility is virtually unsupervised.

Pictures taken this year show how the corpses have decayed over the years. The animals now just lie there, like ornaments or gnomes, dried up and completely lifeless.

(Pics -Daily mail)