As the death toll in Gaza passes 40,000, bodies are being buried in courtyards, streets and row graves – The Journal

Palestinian mourners carry their loved ones to the cemetery for burial in Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip, Friday, August 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Deep beneath the ground of a bloated Gaza cemetery, rows of graves are stacked where Sa'di Baraka spends his days digging up the earth to make room for more dead.

“Sometimes we build graves on graves,” he said.

Baraka and his solemn corps of volunteer gravediggers at Deir al-Balah cemetery begin digging new trenches or reopening existing ones at sunrise. The dead sometimes come from miles away, from parts of Gaza where burial sites are destroyed or inaccessible.

The cemetery is 70 years old. A quarter of the graves are new.

The death toll in Gaza has exceeded 40,000 since the start of the ten-month war between Israel and Hamas, the health ministry of the Hamas-controlled territory said. The figure does not distinguish between civilians and militants.

The small, densely populated strip of land is now littered with corpses.

They fill morgues and flood cemeteries. Families fleeing repeated attacks bury their dead wherever they can: in backyards and parking lots, under stairs and on the side of the road, witness accounts and video footage show. Others lie under rubble, and their families are not sure if they will ever be counted.

“A large cemetery”

Since October, nearly two percent of Gaza's pre-war population has died. Health officials and civil defense workers believe the actual number could be thousands higher. According to the UN, 40 million tons of bodies have been found under the rubble.

“It seems,” wrote Palestinian author Yousri Alghoul for the Institute for Palestine Studies, “that Gaza's destiny is to become one big cemetery of streets, parks and houses, where the living are just dead, waiting for their time.”

Israel began attacking Gaza after Hamas-led militants stormed the Israeli border on October 7, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage. Israel wants to destroy Hamas and claims to limit its attacks to the militants. It blames Hamas for the deaths of civilians and claims the militants operate from residential neighborhoods riddled with tunnels. 329 Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting.

Even in death, Palestinians were displaced by Israel’s offensives.

Palestinians transport corpses to protect them from the war. The Israeli military has dug up, ploughed up and bombed more than 20 cemeteries, according to satellite images analyzed by the investigative portal Bellingcat. Troops have brought dozens of corpses to Israel in search of hostages. The bodies are brought back to Gaza by truck, are often decomposed and unidentifiable and are quickly buried in mass graves.

The Israeli military told the Associated Press that it tries to rescue hostages if intelligence suggests they may be there. It said bodies determined not to be hostages would be returned “with dignity and respect.”

Haneen Salem, a photographer and writer in northern Gaza, has lost more than 270 relatives to bombings and artillery fire. Salem said between 15 and 20 of them were exhumed – some after troops destroyed cemeteries, others were reburied by relatives fearing their graves would be destroyed by Israeli forces.

“I don't know how to explain how it feels to see the bodies of my loved ones scattered on the ground, a piece of flesh here and a piece of bone there,” she said. “If we are alive after the war, we will dig a new grave and spread roses and water on it for their good souls.”

Honoring the dead

In peacetime, funerals in the Gaza Strip were major family affairs.

According to Islamic tradition, the body was washed and wrapped in a shroud. After prayers in the mosque, the body was taken in procession to the cemetery, where it was laid on its right side, facing east, towards Mecca.

The rituals are the simplest way to honor the dead, said Hassan Fares. “There is nothing like that in Gaza.”

Twenty-five members of Fares' family were killed in an airstrike in northern Gaza on October 13. With no gravediggers available, Fares dug three trenches in a cemetery and buried four cousins, his aunt and his uncle. Survivors whispered short prayers over the distant hum of warplanes.

Those who died early in the war may have been the lucky ones, Fares said. They received a funeral, albeit a brief one.

Nawaf al-Zuriei, a morgue worker at Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Hospital in Deir al-Balah, is at the forefront of the onslaught of dead. Workers cover the injured bodies with plastic to avoid blood stains on the white shrouds.

“We are wiping the blood from his face so that it is in a suitable condition when his relatives say goodbye to him,” he said.

Dozens of bodies lie on the streets after Israeli troops withdrew. With fuel in short supply, workers collecting the dead are filling trucks with bodies and strapping some to the roof to save fuel, said Mohammed el-Mougher, a civil defense official.

Gravestones are rare, some graves are marked with pieces of rubble.

If a body cannot be identified, workers place a plastic plaque at the grave with the burial date, identification number and location where the body was found.

In search of lost relatives

The uncertain fate of the bodies of relatives preoccupies the families.

Mousa Jomaa, an orthopedic surgeon living in al-Ram in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, watched from afar as 21 relatives fell victim to the war in Gaza.

Jomaa's cousin Mohammed was killed in an Israeli airstrike while driving an ambulance in southern Gaza early in the war. He was buried in Rafah, far from the family home in central Gaza. The cemetery was damaged in a later offensive. There is no trace of Mohammed's body, Jomaa said.

In December, an attack destroyed Jomaa's uncle's house, killing his aunt and her children, 8-year-old Mira and 10-year-old Omar. Jomaa's uncle, Dr. Hani Jomaa, rushed home to search the rubble, but before he could find Mira's body, he too was killed in an attack.

Because her body has not been recovered, Mira is not counted among the dead, said Jomaa, who showed a photo of the young girl standing next to her brother and carrying a rainbow handbag that matches her hair clip.

In July, an Israeli tank killed two more cousins, Mohammed and Baha. Baha's body was mangled and the shelling made it too dangerous to recover the remains for weeks.

Jomaa said he would visit Gaza after the war to search for Mira's remains.

Destroyed graves and cemeteries are closed

Israeli evacuation orders apply to large parts of the Gaza Strip; some of the largest cemeteries are inaccessible.

Jake Godin, a researcher at Bellingcat, has used satellite imagery to document the destruction of more than 20 cemeteries. Where cemeteries once were, sandy, bulldozed areas can be seen. The Sheikh Radwan cemetery in Gaza is riddled with craters. In Gaza's Eastern Cemetery, gravestones are buried under tire tracks, he says.

“Wherever the (Israeli military) is active, they bulldoze and destroy the ground, with no regard for cemeteries,” Godin said.

The military told the AP that it does not have a policy of destroying graves. “The unfortunate reality of ground warfare in densely populated civilian areas” can lead to damage to cemeteries, it said. It found Hamas tunnels under a cemetery east of the southern city of Khan Younis.

Mahmoud Alkrunz, a student in Turkey, said his father, mother, two brothers, sister and the children of three of his siblings were buried in the cemetery of Bureij refugee camp after Israel bombed their home.

When Israel withdrew from Bureij in January, the graves were dug up. Alkrunz fainted when his uncle told him the news.

“We don’t know what happened to the bodies,” he said.

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Frankel reported from Jerusalem. AP correspondent Jack Jeffery in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed.

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Palestinian gravedigger Sa'di Baraka pauses as he digs new graves to make room for more dead from the 10-month war at a cemetery in Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip on Friday, Aug. 2, 2024. “We bury martyrs,” Baraka said. “Sometimes we put graves on top of graves.” (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinian gravedigger Sa'di Baraka, center, oversees a burial at the cemetery in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

FILE – Workers carry a body, one of more than 80 bodies returned by Israel, to a cemetery in Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip, Monday, Aug. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana, File)

Palestinian morgue worker Nawaf al-Zuriei prepares a shroud at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip, Friday, Aug. 4, 2024. Those killed in the war are considered ritually pure according to Islamic tradition, so their bodies are not washed, he said. Workers cover the damaged bodies with plastic to avoid bloodstains on the white shrouds. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinian mourners prepare to bury their loved ones at the cemetery in Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip, Friday, August 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinian mourners bury their loved ones at the cemetery in Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip, Friday, August 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinian mourners bury their loved ones at the cemetery in Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip, Friday, August 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

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