Cemeteries in the Gaza Strip are reportedly overflowing with residents digging up old graves to add new bodies as the death toll mounts in the enclave.
In the last 48 hours, Israel has stepped up operations against Hamas in Gaza ramping up airstrikes and launching a ground offensive in the north of the strip.
Hamas-run Palestinian health authorities claim the death toll in Gaza has topped 8,000 while reports have emerged of entire families being killed in the fighting.
In Gaza’s central town of Zawaideh, a 22-year-old Palestinian photojournalist buried 32 members of his family who were killed in Israeli air raids last Sunday.
Omar Dirawi unloaded 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 overhead and everyone ran indoors.
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Dirawi said of the mass burial: “There’s nothing that feels right about this. I haven’t even grieved. But I had no choice. The cemetery was full and there was no space.”
Hospitals and morgues are said to have been overwhelmed by the huge amount of wounded and dead as a result of the war.
Since October 7, when Hamas mounted a bloody and unprecedented terrorist attack on Israel, the Israeli military’s response has left over 8,000 Palestinians dead, said the Gaza-based Health Ministry yesterday.
Of the dead, it added, nearly 300 have not been identified. Fear and panic were spreading Saturday as Israel expanded its ground incursion and intensified bombardment.
An estimated 1,700 people remain trapped beneath the rubble as Israel’s air raids impede and imperil civil defence workers, one of whom was killed during a rescue mission Friday. Overcrowded cemeteries have compelled families to dig up long-buried bodies and deepen the holes.
Overflowing morgues have forced 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 now holding 63 and 46 bodies, respectively, said Mohammed Abu Selmia, the general director of Shifa Hospital.
The nightmare of ending up as an anonymous body piled up in a morgue or chucked into the dirt has increasingly haunted Palestinians in Gaza.
To increase the chances of being identified if they die, Palestinian families have begun wearing identification bracelets and scrawling names with markers on their children’s arms and legs.
Hamas has continued to launch rockets into Israel following the October 7 attack that left at least 1,400 Israelis dead. Tel Aviv has portrayed the war as one for Israel’s survival with top political and military leaders warning it was likely to continue at length.
