No rest for Gaza dead with swift burials, bodies dug up

Even the dead are not spared by the Hamas-Israel war raging in Gaza, with bodies dug up by Israeli troops and hurried burials happening in hospitals and even a school.
In Gaza City’s Al Tuffah district, shrouded corpses of Palestinians torn from their graves lay atop muddied earth.
Israel’s military had bulldozed the site and exhumed bodies, according to a media photographer who visited it earlier this month.
The desecration is part of a pattern which the religious affairs ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said has seen more than 2,000 graves damaged or destroyed by Israeli forces across the territory.
Israel’s military did not immediately comment on the bulldozing of cemeteries, when approached for comment by reporters.
Responding separately to allegations that soldiers have snatched bodies from graves, the military told reporters that it acts “in the specific locations where information indicates that the bodies of hostages may be located.”
“Bodies determined not (to) be those of hostages are returned with dignity and respect,” it said in a statement.
The war erupted with the Oct.7 Hamas attack which resulted in about 1,140 deaths, mostly civilians, in southern Israel.
Hamas also seized 250 hostages, of whom Israel says around 132 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 28.
Israel’s relentless military offensive has killed at least 26,637 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the Hamas government’s health ministry in the territory.
‘Their souls trembled’

At a school packed with displaced people in the central Deir Al Balah area, Saida Jaber recalled seeing footage on social media of Jabalia refugee camp’s destroyed cemetery.
“I felt that my heart would stop,” Jaber told reporters, adding that her father, grandparents and other relatives were buried at the site in northern Gaza.
“I felt that their souls trembled… I can’t imagine how anyone dares to dig up graves and violate the sanctity of the dead,” Jaber said.
With no stop to the fighting, many Gazans have been unable to reach formal cemeteries and have instead turned to makeshift graveyards.
At a school-turned-shelter in the central Maghazi refugee camp, a woman touched the sandy earth where her daughter had been buried in the yard.
“My daughter died in my arms … we waited day and night and couldn’t send her to the emergency room,” said the woman, who did not give her name.
She told reporters that rockets hit the school compound and ignited gas canisters, causing deadly explosions.
A man tending to the site said more than 50 people are buried there, each grave containing three or four bodies, with their names written either on bricks or the adjacent wall.
‘Die of grief’
The scale of fatalities is such that AFP journalists have seen mass graves across Gaza.