People bury the body of a Palestinian killed in an Israeli raid, on a cemetery where displaced Palestinians shelter as Gaza health ministry announced that death toll has surpassed 40,000, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, August 15, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
Tiers of graves are stacked deep underground in a bloated Gaza cemetery, where Sa’di Baraka spends his days hacking at the earth, making room for more dead.
“Sometimes we make graves on top of graves,” he said.
Mr. Baraka and his solemn corps of volunteer gravediggers in the Deir al-Balah cemetery start at sunrise, digging new trenches or reopening existing ones. The dead can sometimes come from kilometres (miles) away, stretches of Gaza where burial grounds are destroyed or unreachable.
The cemetery is 70 years old. A quarter of its graves are new.
The death toll in Gaza since the beginning of the 10-month-old Israel-Hamas war has passed 40,000, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
The small, densely populated strip of land is now packed with bodies.
They fill morgues and overflow cemeteries. Families, fleeing repeatedly to escape offensives, bury their dead wherever possible: in backyards and parking lots, beneath staircases, and along roadsides, according to witness accounts and video footage. Others lie under rubble, their families unsure they will ever be counted.
A steady drumbeat of death since October has claimed nearly 2% of Gaza’s pre-war population. Health officials and civil defence workers say the true toll could be thousands more, including bodies under rubble that the United Nations says weighs 40 million tons.
‘Gaza: a large cemetery’
“It seems,” Palestinian author Yousri Alghoul wrote for the Institute for Palestine Studies, “that Gaza’s fate is to become one large cemetery, with its streets, parks, and homes, where the living are merely dead awaiting their turn.”
Israel began striking Gaza after Hamas-led militants stormed across the Israeli border on October 7, killing about 1,200 people and taking some 250 others hostage. Israel seeks Hamas’s destruction and claims it confines its attacks to militants. It blames Hamas for civilian deaths, saying the militants operate from residential neighbourhoods laced with tunnels. The fighting has killed 329 Israeli soldiers.
Even in death, Palestinians have been displaced by Israel’s offensives.
Palestinians move corpses, shielding them from the path of war. Israel’s military has dug up, ploughed over and bombed more than 20 cemeteries, according investigative outlet Bellingcat. Troops have taken scores of bodies into Israel, searching for hostages. Trucked back to Gaza, the bodies are often decomposed and unidentifiable, buried quickly in a mass grave.
Returned with respect
Israel’s military said that it is attempting to rescue hostage bodies where intelligence indicates they may be located. It said bodies determined not to be hostages are returned “with dignity and respect.”
Haneen Salem, a photographer and writer from northern Gaza, has lost over 270 extended family members in bombardments and shelling. Mr. Salem said between 15 and 20 of them have been disinterred — some after troops destroyed cemeteries and others moved by relatives out of fear Israeli forces would destroy their graves.
“I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to see the bodies of my loved ones lying on the ground, scattered, a piece of flesh here and bone there,” she said.
In peacetime, Gaza funerals were large family affairs.
The corpse would be washed and wrapped in a shroud, according to Islamic tradition. After prayers over the body at a mosque, a procession would take it to the graveyard, where it would be laid on its right side facing east, toward Mecca. The rituals are the most basic way to honour the dead, said Mr. Hassan Fares. “This does not exist in Gaza.”
Twenty-five members of Mr. Fares’s family were killed by an air strike on October 13 in northern Gaza. Without gravediggers available, Mr. Fares dug three ditches in a cemetery, burying four cousins, his aunt and his uncle. Those who died early in the war might have been the lucky ones, Mr. Fares said. They had funerals, even if brief.
Nawaf al-Zuriei, a morgue worker at Deir al-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, is on the front lines of the rush of dead. Workers cover the damaged bodies in plastic to avoid bloodstains on white shrouds. “We wipe the blood off the face so it’s in a suitable state for his loved ones to bid him farewell,” he said.
Following Israeli troop withdrawals, dozens of bodies are left on the streets. With fuel scarce, workers collecting the dead fill trucks with corpses, strapping some on top to save gas, said civil defence official Mohammed el-Mougher.
Headstones are rare; some graves are marked with chunks of rubble.
When a corpse remains unidentified, workers place a plastic placard at the grave, bearing the burial date, identification number and where the body was found.
The uncertain fate of relatives’ bodies haunts families.
Israeli evacuation orders cover much of Gaza, leaving some of the largest cemeteries off-limits.
Jake Godin, a Bellingcat researcher, has used satellite imagery to document the destruction of more than 20 cemeteries. he said. “Anywhere the [Israeli military] is active, they bulldoze and destroy the ground without regard to cemeteries,” he said.
