GAZA, (PIC)
In a scene that summarizes the scale of the humanitarian disaster left by the Israeli war of genocide on the Gaza Strip, the families of the martyrs face worsening suffering in finding decent graves to bury their loved ones, amid the overcrowding of cemeteries and the rise in burial costs, reaching the point of stray dogs digging up some primitive graves.
From inside Sheikh Radwan cemetery in the center of Gaza City, the Palestinian Sheikh Hamdi says that families no longer find even half a meter to bury their loved ones, in light of the limited number of operating cemeteries in the Strip, which are effectively limited to the Sheikh Radwan and Al-Ma’amadani cemeteries in the east of the city near Al-Ma’amadani Hospital.
With the number of martyrs increasing daily, the cost of any available space for burial inside cemeteries has risen to between 1,200 and 1,400 shekels, approximately 480 to 520 dollars, while some graves are being opened more than once to bury more than one martyr inside the same tomb, according to a report broadcast by Al Jazeera Mubasher.
The crisis did not stop at the borders of official cemeteries, as hundreds of families were forced to convert house yards and private gardens into temporary burial sites, after the inability to reach public cemeteries or bear the exorbitant burial costs.
The Israeli siege imposed on the Strip increases the complexity of the crisis, with the lack of basic building materials necessary to construct graves, such as cement and stones, which pushes the residents to use the rubble of destroyed houses and mud to bury the bodies in primitive graves that lack the minimum requirements for protection.
According to testimonies from citizens, some of these shallow graves, which do not exceed half a meter in depth, were subjected to digging by stray dogs because of the weakness of the backfill and the use of zinc corrugated sheets, which led to the removal of bodies and throwing them in the streets, in shocking scenes that reflect the scale of the humanitarian collapse experienced by the Strip.
Journalists’ lenses also documented extensive bulldozing operations carried out by Israeli machinery inside several cemeteries, including Al-Batesh cemetery east of Gaza, which led to the disappearance of grave features and the mixing of remains, depriving families of knowing the burial places of their children.
This comes at a time when the Israeli occupation army continues to impose its control over large areas of the Strip, coinciding with the destruction of civil infrastructure, including cemeteries, in light of a war that has resulted in the martyrdom of at least 72,000 martyrs and 172,000 injured since October 2023, according to data from the Ministry of Health in Gaza.