In pictures: Gaza buries its loved ones in yards, streets, tiered graves
Families are burying their dead wherever possible: in backyards and parking lots, beneath staircases and along roadsides, while many others lie under rubble, their families unsure they will ever be counted.
Workers carry a body, one of more than 80 bodies returned by Israel, to a cemetery in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Aug. 5, 2024. / Photo: AP
Tiers of graves are stacked deep underground in a bloated Gaza cemetery, where Sa’di Baraka spends his days hacking at the earth, making room for more dead.
"Sometimes we make graves on top of graves," he said.
Baraka and his solemn corps of volunteer gravediggers in the Deir al-Balah cemetery start at sunrise, digging new trenches or reopening existing ones. The dead can sometimes come from kilometres away, stretches of Gaza where burial grounds are destroyed or unreachable.
The cemetery is 70 years old. A quarter of its graves are new.
The small, densely populated strip of land is now packed with bodies.
They fill morgues and overflow cemeteries. Families, fleeing repeatedly to escape offensives, bury their dead wherever possible: in backyards and parking lots, beneath staircases and along roadsides, according to witness accounts and video footage. Others lie under rubble, their families unsure they will ever be counted.
A steady drumbeat of death since October has claimed nearly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population. Health officials and civil defense workers say the true toll could be thousands more, including bodies under rubble that the United Nations says weighs 40 million tonnes.
The below images depict the burial sites of Palestinian martyrs in the midst of Israel's genocidal war.
A steady drumbeat of death since October has claimed nearly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population.
Palestinian grave digger Sa'di Baraka pauses while digging new graves in a cemetery in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, Friday, making room for more killed in the 10-month-old war. "We bury martyrs," Baraka said. "Sometimes we make graves on top of graves."
Health officials and civil defence workers say the true toll could be thousands more, including bodies under rubble that the United Nations says weighs 40 million tonnes.
“It seems,” Palestinian author Yousri Alghoul wrote for the Institute for Palestine Studies, “that Gaza’s fate is to become one large cemetery, with its streets, parks, and homes, where the living are merely dead awaiting their turn."
Palestinian morgue worker Nawaf al-Zuriei, a morgue worker prepares a burial shroud at at Deir al-Balah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the Gaza. Those killed by the war are considered ritually pure under Islamic tradition, so their bodies are not washed, he says. Workers cover the damaged bodies in plastic to avoid bloodstains on white shrouds.
Palestinians move corpses, shielding them from the path of war. Israel’s military has dug up, plowed over and bombed more than 20 cemeteries, according to satellite imagery analyzed by investigative outlet Bellingcat.
Israeli troops have taken scores of bodies into Israel. Trucked back to Gaza, the bodies are often decomposed and unidentifiable, buried quickly in a mass grave.
Haneen Salem, a photographer and writer from northern Gaza, has lost over 270 extended family members in bombardments and shelling. Salem said between 15 and 20 of them have been disinterred — some after troops destroyed cemeteries and others moved by relatives out of fear Israeli forces would destroy their graves.
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