Overflowing Morgues and Mass Graves: In Gaza, Even Death Is No End to Suffering By Wafa Aludaini November 13, 2023

Scenes of death and destruction as a result of the continuous Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, November 11, 2023

Even in death, murdered Palestinians find no relief from the brutal onslaught of the Israeli occupation. Not only to endure massacres, Palestinians who are burying their loved ones in Gaza face arduous strife and aggravated attempts at burial rites. Many are compelled to bury their family members in brief informal ceremonies without processions or large congregations — and even that is dependent on the increasingly challenging possibility of finding any space in Gaza’s crowded cemeteries.

In a dusty field strewn with dead people, wrapped in blankets and zipped-up body bags, amidst the Dair El-Bala'h main graveyard, several Palestinian families congregate, searching for spaces to bury their dead.  "We have no other choice but to dig holes and bury them without bricks or cement," says Mu'hammed Musli'h, 21. "We are burying our beloved family members in expedited funeral rites and burials because of the indiscriminate Israeli airstrikes," he explained, adding that several funerals in cemeteries in the north and Gaza City had been targeted by air strikes. 

Salama Ma'rouf, Head of the Government Media Office (GMO), noted that most of the graveyards are difficult to access, as many are proximal to the separation fence dividing Gaza from Israel, and many cemeteries are overloaded, with minimal availability to receive new corpses.  

“The cemeteries no longer have the capacity to accommodate the number of dead people,” Ma'rouf stated. Additionally, the relevant government institutional Waqf no longer have the capacity to execute the operations for regular burial matters or establish new cemeteries. 

Each Gaza governorate has at least two mass graves, authorities say. Some mass graves contain over 100 people.

Ma'rouf confirms that the increase in the number of victims who cannot be accommodated in hospital morgue refrigerators has prompted relevant authorities to take rapid measures in cooperation with forensic medicine, endowments, and health ministries, by documenting information and photos of the victims, and burying them in mass graves in an emergency manner in order to avoid dangerous decomposition of bodies.

The crisis is a result of the cessation of brick and stone factory production of required burial process materials, in addition to the lack of electricity and various necessary fuels, which hinder the work of diggers and other vehicles on top of the rapid rise of the slain Palestinians.

Mu'hammed bitterly revealed "Nightmares of ending up having no one from my family left to bury me, or to be buried as an unclaimed body piled up in a morgue, or for my body to be left rotting in the streets because there is no place left to bury my body have increasingly haunted me as well as most Palestinians here".

There are many extreme difficulties in identifying martyrs due to the conditions of bodies received by the hospitals, many charred, beheaded, bodies with torn limbs, skulls emptied and broken.

The hospitals' refrigerators cannot accommodate the sheer number of martyrs, leading to the deployment of ice cream trucks to contain corpses, yet the continuously mounting number of bodies and the dwindling fuel supplies have rendered the ice cream trucks a temporary stopgap that will soon become useless. Overflowing morgues have compelled hospitals to bury people before identifying their names. Gravediggers have laid at least 200 anonymous slain bodies side by side in two large mass graves in Gaza City. The brutal, continuous Israeli airstrikes and the lack of fuel for vehicles rob the bereaved families of the funeral rites.  

With the accumulation of corpses and widespread infrastructure collapse, a real fear is spreading amongst officials and locals of the likelihood of the emergence of epidemic diseases.

A civil defense employee angrily stated that the Israeli occupation should give the people of Gaza the opportunity to dig up bodies from under the rubble, as leaving untold thousands of bodies to rot in the debris of the Israeli firebombing is a looming health disaster leading to the spread of diseases. According to the GMO, more than 2,500 missing people remain trapped beneath the rubble of their destroyed homes as Israel’s air raids impede and imperil civil defense workers. 36 civil defense personnel have been murdered in direct targeting by the Israeli war jets.

Abu 'Ammar Yasir Khattab, the supervisor for washing bodies in Al Aqsa Hospital told the PIC, “Usually after washing the body of the dead, the families come to take the body to the family home where everyone bids a final farewell. Then they go to the mosque for praying over the dead, then they take the corpse to be buried in the graveyard, either in a vehicle or in a large congregational procession.” 

He went on to add that, due to the conditions in Gaza, funeral traditions are impossible to undertake, so now funeral prayer is performed on hospital grounds before bodies are transported to the graveyard to be buried without headstones or other personal items.

- Wafa Aludaini is a Gaza-based activist and journalist. She contributed this article to the Palestinian Information Center.

In Gaza, even death is no end to suffering (palinfo.com)

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