No time or place for proper burials
Fighting in region robs Palestinians in Gaza of funeral rites
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — It was neither the place nor the time for a proper goodbye, said Omar Dirawi.
Not here, in this dusty field strewn with dead people wrapped in blankets and zipped up in body bags.
And not now, as Israeli airstrikes crashed around him, erasing more of his neighborhood and sundering hundreds of families and friendships.
Yet in Gaza’s central town of Zawaideh, the 22-year-old Palestinian photojournalist buried 32 members of his family who were killed in Israeli air raids Oct. 22.
Dirawi’s aunts, uncles and cousins from Gaza City had heeded Israeli military evacuation orders and taken refuge in his home farther south.
Days later Dirawi was unloading their bodies from the back of a truck, digging a narrow trench partitioned with cinder blocks and reciting abbreviated funeral prayers before nightfall, when Israeli warplanes screeched and everyone ran indoors.
“There’s nothing that feels right about this,” Dirawi said of the mass burial. “I haven’t even grieved. But I had no choice. The cemetery was full and there was no space.”
Palestinians say this war is robbing them not only of their loved ones but also of the funeral rites that long have offered mourners some dignity and closure in the midst of unbearable grief. Israeli strikes have killed so many people so quickly that they’ve overwhelmed hospitals and morgues, making the normal rituals of death all but impossible.
Since Oct. 7, when Hamas mounted a bloody and unprecedented attack on Israel, the Israeli military’s response has left thousands of Palestinians dead, said the Gaza-based Health Ministry.
“We have hundreds of people being killed every day,” said Inas Hamdan, a Gaza-based communications officer for the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency. “The whole system in Gaza is overwhelmed. People are dealing with the dead however they can.”
Overcrowded cemeteries have compelled families to dig up long-buried bodies and deepen the holes. That’s how survivors interred Bilal al-hour, a professor at Gaza’s Al Aqsa University, and 25 of his family members killed Friday in airstrikes that razed their four-story home in Deir al-balah.
Al-hour’s brother, Nour, exhumed his family’s old plots in the local cemetery to place the newly deceased inside. His hands dark with dirt, he became breathless listing each relative being lowered into the ground.
“There’s Bilal’s son with his wife and children, his other younger son and of course his daughter who finished high school last year and was supposed to be a doctor,” he said before trailing off and quoting the Quran. “To Allah we belong, and to him is our return.”
Overflowing morgues have compelled hospitals to bury people before their relatives can claim them. Gravediggers have laid dozens of unidentified bodies side by side in two large backhoe-dug furrows in Gaza City, said Mohammed Abu Selmia, the general director of Shifa Hospital.
To increase the chances of being identified if they die, Palestinian families have begun wearing identification bracelets and scrawling names with marker on their children’s arms and legs.
In some cases, bodies have decomposed so much they are unrecognizable even to their kin. In other cases, not a single family member may survive to claim the dead.
Gaza’s Awqaf ministry, which is in charge of religious matters, now urges hasty burials and authorizes the digging of mass graves due to the “large numbers of people killed and the small amount of space available.”
Each Gaza governorate has at least two mass graves, authorities say, some holding over 100 people.
In the crowded Nuseirat refugee camp in central
Gaza last week, a fierce barrage of Israeli airstrikes leveled an entire block — some 20 multi-story buildings — killing 150 people and trapping more beneath the ruins, residents said.
Shell-shocked survivors staggered out of the hospital, not knowing what to do with the dead.
“We have no time to do anything and no space anywhere,” said Khalid Abdou, 53, from the camp. “All we can do is dig a big hole with our hands. Then we throw bodies inside.”
Residents of Nuseirat peered into dozens of bloodsmeared body bags arranged outside Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital on Thursday, searching for familiar faces, Abdou said. Workers labeled some body bags “unknown” before shoveling them into mass graves. Families were buried together.
When trying to sleep, Abdou said he hears sounds from that night — the thunder of the blast mixing with screams of shock and the cries of children.
But what keeps him up most, he said, is the thought that no one washed the bodies of the dead or changed their clothes before burial. No one lovingly shrouded their bodies, as is customary in Islam, or held a poignant service.
And certainly no one served the traditional bitter coffee and sweet dates to friends and relatives paying condolences.
“In Islam we have three days of mourning. But there’s no way can you observe that now,” Abdou said. “Before the mourning ends you’ll probably be dead, too.”