Among the many crises created by the ferocious Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, the crisis of graves, shrouds, and bags of the dead stands out due to the large numbers of victims of the intense air strikes, which affected everything on the ground, and the residential homes, which were destroyed above the heads of their residents, had the largest share of blood and destruction.
The local authorities in Gaza are facing great difficulties in keeping up with the daily numbers of martyrs, and providing what is necessary to honor them with burial, starting with the “death bags” used to extract victims from under the rubble, through to coffins, and even graves in cemeteries overflowing with the bodies of victims of the ongoing war that they received for the third week. respectively.
As usual, Gaza always tries to find alternatives, so the “emergency cemetery” was the option to bury the martyrs in “mass graves” in an unusual digging method, according to what the Director General of Endowment Properties in the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, Mazen Al-Najjar, told Al Jazeera Net.
Genocide crimes
According to the latest update by the Ministry of Health in Gaza, the Israeli occupation committed 550 massacres against families, claiming the lives of 3,353 martyrs, and a large number of them are still under the rubble. The Ministry says that it “received 1,400 reports of missing persons, including 720 children.” Civil Defense spokesman Major Mahmoud explains. Basal, in an interview with Al Jazeera Net, said that recovering victims requires human teams and material capabilities that are not available to the agency in Gaza, including the “death bags” used to recover victims from under the rubble, which have completely exhausted.
Basal appealed to the need for aid to Gaza to include “bugs, rams, and cranes” (huge machines used to remove rubble), in addition to advanced devices for detecting living people and victims under the rubble. The morgues in hospitals, the largest of which is Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, are no longer able to accommodate the increase. The instantaneous number of martyrs exceeded 4,500 martyrs. Painful scenes appeared of the bodies of martyrs lying in the corridors and courtyards of hospitals, and in tents set up in their courtyards that contained unknown bodies.
In his interview with Al Jazeera Net, the Director General of Hospitals, Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, estimated the capacity of the combined morgues in the Gaza Strip at about 400 bodies, including 50 corpses for the morgues of Al-Shifa Hospital, which bears the greatest burden of dealing with the victims, both martyrs and wounded, and the bodies of martyrs are piled up inside it by a percentage of people. 150% occupancy.
For the second time since the beginning of the aggression, local authorities yesterday, Saturday, buried 43 unidentified martyrs in “mass graves” inside the “emergency cemetery.” Most of them were torn body parts, including a mother and her children who were buried in one shroud. This was preceded last week by the burial of 63 martyrs in the same way. According to the General Director of Endowment Properties, video clips spread on social media platforms showed the bodies of the martyrs being transported to the emergency cemetery in a vehicle designated for transporting goods due to the lack of sufficient numbers of vehicles transporting the dead.
Mazen Al-Najjar says that specialized committees composed of the relevant ministries in Gaza supervise the mass burial, and have obtained a fatwa and the approval of jurists taking into account the scale of the disaster and the unprecedented increase in the number of martyrs, as a result of the occupation’s “madness” in committing “horrific crimes.”
Emergency cemetery
This war is considered the most violent and bloodiest of the five wars launched by the occupation against Gaza over the course of 15 years, in addition to an unlimited number of escalations. In the first hours of this war, the ready-made graves prepared by the endowment properties to deal with times of emergency and war were exhausted.
Al-Najjar said, “We, as endowment properties, are responsible for managing cemetery affairs, and inspired by the experiences of previous wars, we built an emergency cemetery in the Shujaiya neighborhood in Gaza City on an area of 13 dunums, which contained 500 to 700 reserve graves at the time the war broke out.”
What makes the reality worse is that Gaza City, the largest and most densely populated city in the Strip, is suffering from a land crisis that can be converted into cemeteries, as the city has 11 very old cemeteries, 9 of which have been completely closed and it is no longer possible to be buried in them because they are completely full, indicating that the Shujaiya cemetery It is built on an area of 280 dunums and is about to be filled (a dunum equals 1 square kilometer in Palestine).
Despite the decision to close some old cemeteries, including archaeological cemeteries, Al-Najjar says that “the families of martyrs were forced to be buried in them due to the dangers of reaching the cemeteries located close to the Israeli security fence, in addition to the impossibility of reaching a cemetery built on an area of 50 dunums in the town of Beit Hanoun.” It is adjacent to the Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing and contains 250 ready-made graves, in addition to the presence of 6 other graves distributed among the cities of the North Governorate, which were subjected to a large share of Israeli air strikes.
In light of this difficult reality, the local authorities resorted to an alternative to the usual individual graves, which require space and equipment, by digging mass graves in the emergency cemetery using parallel lines and at a depth of only one meter.
In it, the bodies are “stacked” next to each other, and dirt is poured over them without placing retaining stones surrounding the inner sides of the graves, and without covering them from above with cement cubes as in private individual graves, due to the factories stopping manufacturing stones and cubes due to electricity outages, fuel depletion, and the dangers of Working under intense air raids.
Burial mechanism and lack of shrouds
Regarding the mechanism adopted by the competent committees supervising the mass burial process, Al-Najjar explains that the known martyrs were identified by their names, while the unidentified were given numbers and their bodies were documented with photographs, noting that many of the bodies were torn pieces and difficult to identify.
He said that burial in the mass graves in the emergency cemetery is permanent and not temporary, and "these graves will not be exhumed and the bodies will not be exhumed and buried in private individual graves."
The cities of the Gaza Strip, which is inhabited by 2.2 million people over an area of 360 km2, deplete approximately 9 dunums of cemeteries annually, each dunum of which is sufficient for 220 to 240 graves, which creates a severe crisis in providing sufficient areas of land and allocating them to cemeteries, according to Al-Najjar.
The same spokesman said, "We are facing a special and unprecedented reality, and the level of the occupation's crimes has created many crises, affecting even the coffins in hospitals, which suffer from a major deficit in providing coffins to keep pace with the increasing numbers of martyrs."
It is noteworthy that death sinks are spread across the Gaza Strip’s hospitals and supervise the process of preparing the bodies of martyrs for burial by placing them in bags and shrouding them, writing the details of each martyr on the shroud, and handing them over to his family for burial if the martyr is known, and if he is unknown, then his resting place is the emergency cemetery.
