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DEIR-AL-BALAH: It was neither the place nor the time for a proper goodbye, said Omar Dirawi. Not here, in this dusty field strewn with dead people wrapped in blankets and zipped up in body bags. And not now, as Israeli airstrikes crashed around him for the third week, erasing more of his neighborhood and sundering hundreds of families and friendships.
Yet on this October week in Gaza’s central town of Zawaideh, the 22-year-old Palestinian photojournalist buried 32 members of his family who were killed in Israeli air raids last Sunday.
Dirawi’s aunts, uncles and cousins from Gaza City had heeded Israeli military evacuation orders and taken refuge in his home farther south. Days later Dirawi was unloading 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 and everyone ran indoors. “There’s nothing that feels right about this,” Dirawi said of the mass burial. “I haven’t even grieved. But I had no choice. The cemetery was full and there was no space.”Palestinians say this war is robbing them not only of their loved ones but also of the funeral rites that long have offered mourners some dignity and closure amid unbearable grief. Israeli strikes have killed so many people so quickly that they’ve overwhelmed hospitals and morgues, making the normal rituals of death all but impossible.
An estimated 1,700 people remain trapped beneath the rubble as Israel’s air raids impede and imperil civil defense workers, one of whom was killed during a rescue mission Friday. Sometimes it takes days for medics to recover bodies. By then corpses are often too swollen and disfigured to be recognizable.
“We have hundreds of people being killed every day,” said Inas Hamdan, a Gaza-based communications officer for the UN Palestinian refugee agency. “The whole system in Gaza is overwhelmed. People are dealing with the dead however they can.”
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 marker on their children’s arms and legs. In some cases, bodies have decomposed so much they are unrecognizable even to their kin. In other cases, not a single family member may survive to claim the dead.
Yet on this October week in Gaza’s central town of Zawaideh, the 22-year-old Palestinian photojournalist buried 32 members of his family who were killed in Israeli air raids last Sunday.
Dirawi’s aunts, uncles and cousins from Gaza City had heeded Israeli military evacuation orders and taken refuge in his home farther south. Days later Dirawi was unloading 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 and everyone ran indoors. “There’s nothing that feels right about this,” Dirawi said of the mass burial. “I haven’t even grieved. But I had no choice. The cemetery was full and there was no space.”Palestinians say this war is robbing them not only of their loved ones but also of the funeral rites that long have offered mourners some dignity and closure amid unbearable grief. Israeli strikes have killed so many people so quickly that they’ve overwhelmed hospitals and morgues, making the normal rituals of death all but impossible.
An estimated 1,700 people remain trapped beneath the rubble as Israel’s air raids impede and imperil civil defense workers, one of whom was killed during a rescue mission Friday. Sometimes it takes days for medics to recover bodies. By then corpses are often too swollen and disfigured to be recognizable.
“We have hundreds of people being killed every day,” said Inas Hamdan, a Gaza-based communications officer for the UN Palestinian refugee agency. “The whole system in Gaza is overwhelmed. People are dealing with the dead however they can.”
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 marker on their children’s arms and legs. In some cases, bodies have decomposed so much they are unrecognizable even to their kin. In other cases, not a single family member may survive to claim the dead.
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