Gaza is running out of places to bury the dead | Gaza News

Twenty-year-old Omar al-Sawhi has to discover a burial place for his father, Mohammad, 40, who was shot lifeless near the “Yellow Line”, an Israeli-designated army zone in Gaza.

Mohammad, from the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza Metropolis, was working at a small roadside stall promoting tea and low when a bullet struck him within the neck on June 10, killing him nearly immediately.

Omar headed to the Zeitoun Cemetery to bury his father and located the graves tightly packed collectively, lots of them victims of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

A lot of them are marked with only a stone and a chunk of paper connected bearing the title of the deceased, because of an absence of house and the tough situations brought on by the struggle.

“I stood in the midst of the cemetery and noticed so many graves. There have been mountains of sand, with individuals buried beneath,” Omar advised Al Jazeera.

“A grave was only a stone with a chunk of paper bearing the title of the martyr, with out the grave being constructed or correctly ready because it was earlier than the struggle.”

A grave right here at the moment prices about 500 shekels ($167), a sum his household couldn’t afford, in order that they needed to discover another.

“There was additionally no house for a brand new grave, so we needed to bury him in my grandfather’s grave,” he mentioned.

Burying the lifeless

The whole breakdown of providers in Gaza and the risks from Israeli assaults meant that hundreds of lifeless Palestinians have been counted as “lacking” through the struggle.

A lot of them had been buried in gardens, or tents, or the grounds of camps for the displaced, faculties or hospitals.

After a relative discount in Israeli violence in Gaza following the United States-brokered ceasefire in October 2025, households started to get well their lifeless family members from the particles of destroyed properties or short-term burial websites.

No less than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed because the ceasefire was introduced, each one in all them needing an area for burial. Authorities in Gaza mentioned the stays of 529 Palestinians had been recovered from seven mass graves within the grounds of hospitals.

Profiting from the transient lull in Israeli violence, his household excavated Mohammad’s stays and moved them to a cemetery for a last burial.

The scarcity of graves isn’t just because of the greater than 73,000 Palestinians killed because the struggle on Gaza started in October 2023, but additionally the destruction of burial websites by Israel.

In line with Gaza’s Ministry of Endowments and Spiritual Affairs, greater than 40 cemeteries have been destroyed because the struggle started.

Israeli forces have additionally enforced tight restrictions on entry to cemeteries in areas underneath their management, which has additional diminished the variety of burial areas out there to households.

With tons of of hundreds of Palestinians pressured from their properties by Israeli bombing and compelled displacement orders, areas beforehand designated for burial websites have been transformed into shelters for the displaced.

Authorities in Gaza say that shortages of supplies, equivalent to headstones, imply the price of burial now ranges between 700 ($235) and 1,000 shekels ($335).

Masonry from destroyed buildings, mud, or corrugated metallic sheets are used as short-term grave markers till the cash might be discovered for a correct headstone.

Ikrami al-Madallal, a media official on the Endowments Ministry, mentioned lots of Gaza’s 60 cemeteries had been already at full capability when the struggle started.

“We have to set up new cemeteries due to the scarcity of obtainable burial house,” he advised Al Jazeera.

The ministry is looking for new burial grounds, and transferring our bodies from short-term locations of relaxation to cemeteries is an ongoing problem for authorities.

“The switch of our bodies can’t be carried out randomly. It should be coordinated with the Ministry of Endowments, native authorities and the related authorities authorities,” he mentioned.

Tafesh Abu Hatab, 50, who has labored as a gravedigger for greater than 19 years, mentioned the struggle on Gaza has been probably the most tough interval of his profession.

Khan Younis Cemetery, the place he works, had about 60 graves in the beginning of the struggle. Now it comprises 6,000, and at one stage of the struggle, Tafesh was making ready about 35 graves a day.

“We have now by no means skilled a interval of bloodshed this devastating,” he advised Al Jazeera. “Not a day passes with out dozens of martyrs being buried.”

Lots of the lifeless he handles are ladies and kids, together with infants. Generally the our bodies of complete households enter the cemetery after an Israeli bomb obliterates a complete constructing, car, or tent.

“They destroy our properties over our heads, and from the rubble of these properties, we construct our graves,” he mentioned.