As Gaza losses mount, dignified burials are yet another casualty

For four days, Kareem Sabawi’s body lay wrapped in a blanket in an empty apartment as his family sheltered nearby. He was killed during Israeli bombardment near his family home, his father and mother said, and in the days that followed, it was too dangerous to lay their 10-year-old child to rest.

His family called the Palestine Red Crescent for help. But it was the early days of Israel’s ground invasion in the northern Gaza Strip, and forces were blocking streets with tanks, preventing rescue workers from reaching those killed by Israeli airstrikes. Each day, the father, Hazem Sabawi, suffered a double torment — mourning his son and unable to grant him the dignity of a burial.

“After the fourth day, I said that’s it. Either I will be buried with him, or I won’t bury him at all,” he said, recounting how he laid his son under a guava tree behind a neighbor’s apartment building.

“(Everyone) has the right to be buried,” Sabawi said.

It has been 13 weeks since Israel’s war in Gaza began after the Hamas attack which killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials. Since then, those living in Gaza have been forced to inter their dead without ceremony or last rites, lest they risk the same fate.

More than 22,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since Oct. 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Civilians are being killed at a pace with few precedents in this century. The conflict has turned Gaza into a “graveyard for thousands of children,” the United Nations said.

“The situation has gotten to the point where we say: The lucky are those who have someone to bury them when they die,” said Dr. Mohammad Abu Moussa, a radiologist at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza.

Traditionally, Palestinians honor their dead with public funeral processions and mourning tents erected on streets for three days to receive those who want to offer condolences. But the war has made those traditions impossible to uphold.

Instead, the dead have been buried in mass graves, hospital courtyards and backyard gardens, often without headstones, their names scrawled on white burial shrouds or body bags. Funeral prayers are said quickly — if at all — in hospital hallways or outside morgues.

Nebal Farsakh, a spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent, said the violence often made it impossible for rescuers to reach attack sites or recover bodies. Some families have been trapped inside their homes for days with the corpses of their loved ones, she said.

Gaza health officials estimate about 7,000 people in Gaza are missing, most presumed dead under the enormous destruction from Israel’s onslaught. On some homes, people have spray-painted the names of those believed to be buried under the rubble.

As nearly 2 million civilians have been displaced and made dangerous treks on foot to southern Gaza — passing Israeli forces with guns trained on them — some have described seeing dozens of bodies along the way, bloated and decomposing. They have told The New York Times that Israeli soldiers would not allow them to even cover, much less bury, the dead.