JERUSALEM/GAZA: Once a day, Umm Omar picks up the phone and calls her late husband, humoring their four-year-old daughter who does not understand yet her father was killed early in the Gaza war. Little Ella “wants us to call him, to tell him about her day”, said Umm Omar, who has fled with her three children to Al-Mawasi, a coastal area teeming with mostly displaced Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip. A steadily climbing death toll, reported by territory’s health ministry, nears 40,000 people killed in Gaza since the Zionist attack began. Umm Omar told AFP she did not understand “how the months have gone by” since her husband, Ibrahim Al-Shanbari, was killed in a Zionist strike on northern Gaza.

When he died, Umm Omar said she lost everything “in a fraction of a second”, but there was little time to bury him properly, grieve or process the loss of the “kind” man that he was. There was no funeral procession or “any of the usual mourning (rituals) because it’s wartime”, Umm Omar added. “It was very difficult to say goodbye ... because the martyrs were buried very quickly,” she said. To help Ella, “I ended up pretending” her father was still alive, said Umm Omar.

Still, according to her, others had it worse, “those who have lost an entire family, those who have not been able to say goodbye, or those who find their children in pieces”. With more than 1.5 percent of Gaza’s 2.4 million people killed during the war, many inhabitants of the besieged coastal territory have lost loved ones. But under constant bombardment, shelling and battles, Gazans often have little time — or place that is not in ruins — to process their grief. Some bled to death before reaching hospitals, many of which had gone out of service or facing severe shortages amid a Zionist siege. Other victims were crushed under their toppled homes, their bodies eventually retrieved from the rubble of bombed-out neighborhoods. Some are still missing, feared buried under the ruins.

A Palestinian man waits for news of his daughter as rescue workers search for survivors under the rubble of a building hit in Zionist bombing on April 21, 2024.

Digging up graves

Even the dead buried in cemeteries cannot rest. Residents of the southern city of Khan Yunis said Zionist soldiers have dug up graves on several occasions at the Bani Suhaila cemetery in Gaza. Bilal Al-Qahwaji buried several members of his family, including two brothers, there in November after they were killed in a Zionist air strike. He can no longer find their bodies. “They (Zionist forces) dug it up once again — a first, second and third time,” he told Reuters. “There are no corpses. My martyrs are all in this area and I didn’t find them.”

The cemetery in Khan Younis has suffered damage several times in Zionist air strikes and during ground operations there, residents say. The Zionist military said in a statement to Reuters that it “in no way targets cemeteries as such and has no policy of harming or desecrating cemeteries”. But the military has previously said it dug in Bani Suhaila to find and destroy a tunnel it says, without evidence, that Hamas built to house a military command center, a use it argued deprived the site of international legal protection. The International Criminal Court’s founding Rome Statute defines the desecration of dead bodies as a war crime.

Qahwaji said the United Nations and other international organizations should help return the bodies of those who were buried in the cemetery. But for now, Palestinians have to deal with the ruins and remains on their own, as members of the Khan Yunis Civil Defence zip body bags on the ground and carry them onto trucks. “Were (Zionist forces) taking revenge on the dead in their graves, by digging them up and taking them out into the open?” said Yamen Abu Suleiman, its director.

A final embrace

The incessant Zionist assault has rendered many cemeteries inaccessible, often forcing Gazans to dig makeshift graves with whatever tools they can find, Mustafa al-Khatib, 56, who has lost several relatives, told AFP. “There are no stones or cement to make a concrete covering for the grave either”, he said. The hasty interment of Khatib’s uncle in a hospital yard has left him with a “heavy heart”, he said. His sister was laid to rest at a long-abandoned cemetery, which Khatib said was later bombed. In central Gaza’s Al-Maghazi refugee camp, a woman placed her hand on the ground outside a school used a displacement shelter: this is where she said her daughter was buried after dying in her arms, fatally wounded in a blast. With nearly all Gazans displaced at least once by the war, and often far from home, they have resorted to burying loved ones on any available patch of land, in the street, or sometimes on football fields. Many do not know when they may be able to return to their burial spots or even find them again.

In the nearly 10 months since the war began, AFP correspondents have witnessed mass burials and bodies put in the ground in blood-stained blankets. Some were wrapped in plastic sheets, marked with a number rather than a name, either because the bodies were unrecognizable or because no relatives had come to claim them. Across the ravaged territory, which had already suffered for years under a crippling Zionist-led blockade and bombardment, hasty burials are now conducted daily in the midst of fighting, evacuation orders and hazardous journeys to find food, water and medical care. Khatib said he had “grown accustomed” to the often chaotic and fleeting farewells before friends and family return to their daily task of survival.

Gazans interviewed by AFP have struggled or were outright unable to express their grief and loss. Many said they await their own death to rejoin their loved ones. For more than six months, Ali Khalil has known that his 32-year-old son Mohammed was killed in the bombing of his home in the Al-Shati refugee camp, on the outskirts of Gaza City. But he was far, having fled for safety with his grandchildren to the coastal territory’s south, when he heard the news. “What hurts me the most is not having been able to bury my son, not having hugged him and not having said goodbye to him,” said the grieving 54-year-old man. “I wonder if his body remained intact or if it was in pieces. I have no idea.” — Agencies