Gaza- “They destroy our homes over our heads, and from the rubble of their stones we build our graves,” says “the shopkeeper” Tafesh Abu Hatab, as he describes himself. He has been working in the profession of digging graves and burying the dead for 19 years, and currently supervises the Turkish cemetery west of the city. Khan Younis In the south Gaza Strip.
Throughout his two decades of work in this profession, Abu Hatab considers the current Israeli war to be the “most difficult period,” and he tells Al Jazeera Net, “We have never experienced a bloody period as crazy as this war. Not a day goes by without dozens of martyrs being buried.”
What is most painful for this man in his sixties is that he digs graves and buries martyrs on a daily basis, most of whom are women and children, including newborns and infants, and entire families who have been turned into pieces and erased from the civil registry, as the cemetery is about to fill up. It contained 60 graves when the war broke out in October of last year, but today it contains more than 6,000 graves.
graves of rubble
Abu Hatab is not an official employee, and working in grave digging is a profession that he lives on with a number of his sons and workers with him. He says that the war has caused the cost of digging and preparing graves to rise, and with great sadness he describes the situation: “The war has raised the prices of everything in Gaza, except our blood, which is cheap in this unjust world.”
Before the war broke out, Abu Hatab used to dig and prepare the grave for 280 shekels (the dollar is equivalent to 3.7 shekels) and collect the price from the deceased’s family with a profit margin ranging from 50 to 100 shekels. But in the meantime, due to the fierce war and the stifling siege, with the closure of the crossings, the halting of stone and brick factories, and the scarcity of cement, the costs of building the grave have increased, with its cost ranging from 450 to 500 shekels.
With these factories closed, Abu Hatab has resorted to the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings, and buys from workers on animal-drawn carts the stones they collect that are suitable for recycling. He cleans them, prepares them, and uses them as retaining walls for graves. He says that these stones are more expensive than the new ones he used before the war.
Before the war, the new factory stone was sold for about one and a half shekels, while Abu Hatab is currently forced to buy one stone from the remains of the Israeli bombing and air raids for 4 shekels. The price of a ton of cement has risen from 400 shekels to 5,000 shekels. This man says sharply and angrily, “With these prices, I can buy a cement ship in Egypt.”
“People are grieving, and many of them do not have the money for a grave, and do not know these costs, and they hold me responsible. So what should I do?” Abu Hatab wonders about the role of official and civil institutions and bodies in supporting the digging and preparation of graves in light of this bloody war.
Municipalities, charitable organizations, and entrepreneurs in a number of cemeteries in the Strip bear the costs of graves for burying martyrs and dead people from the poor and needy classes.
horrors of war
Abu Hatab looks around the modern cemetery that was opened a few years ago. He estimates that he has dug graves and participated in burying more than 7,000 martyrs since the outbreak of the war. The most difficult days for him were when 137 Palestinians were martyred, including dozens of his family members, who had been displaced from Gaza City to Khan Yunis.
During the months of war, this man lost more than 120 martyrs from his “Satariyah” tribe, including his son and brother. He says that this number is equivalent to the number of deaths in the tribe over the course of 10 to 15 years in normal times.
For 10 years, Tariq (28 years old) has been working with his father Tafesh Abu Hatab in this profession. This single young man in his twenties told Al Jazeera Net that he never imagined that he would be digging this number of graves in one day. Before the war, he would dig no more than 10 graves per month.
Tariq estimates that the cemetery he has been working in since it opened seven years ago is close to being completely full. In order to keep up with the huge numbers of martyrs every day, this young man and his father have resorted to the method of digging graves close together, with no spaces between them, which is unusual in Gaza cemeteries.
The shopkeeper Tariq lived through harsh events and his memory stores many horrors of war. He recalls with great emotion that a man came to him carrying 3 bags of body parts to bury. He said that they belonged to his 9-year-old child, who was targeted by an Israeli drone with a missile, hitting him directly and tearing his body apart.
One of the bloodiest days of the war for this young man and his father, as they agreed, was the “Mawasi massacre,” in which the occupation forces claimed to have targeted the commander-in-chief of…Ezzedine al-Qassam BrigadesThe military arm of the Islamic Resistance Movementagitation“، Mohammed Al-Daifand the commander of the Khan Yunis Brigade, Rafeh Salama, in which dozens of civilians were martyred.
Tariq says, “We prepare about 30 graves every day. On the day of the massacre, these graves were not enough for the number of martyrs who arrived at the cemetery, including men, women and children. The occupation’s missiles turned their bodies into pieces that were placed in bags for burial.”
Tragic reality
In addition to the endless processions of martyrs as a result of Israeli crimes and massacres, the Director General of the Government Media Office, Ismail Al-Thawabta, told Al Jazeera Net that the number of natural deaths has increased to six and a half times what it was before the war, as a result of the repercussions of the war, the stifling siege, the collapse of the health system, and the spread of diseases and epidemics.
With the occupation targeting about 60 cemeteries by demolishing and bulldozing them, and exhuming more than 1,500 graves, and the inability of citizens to reach cemeteries in dangerous areas close to the Israeli security fence and the areas of occupation penetration, there was a resort to painful alternative options such as mass burial, and building adjacent graves using stones and waste from destroyed homes and buildings, according to Al-Thawabat.
The government official points out that the genocidal war imposed many other harsh choices on the people of Gaza, including burial in random graves, in the streets, school yards and hospitals.
According to data from the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, the Gaza Strip, which is inhabited by about 2.2 million people over an area of 360 square kilometers, consumes about 9 dunams (one dunam equals one thousand square meters) of cemeteries annually, and one dunam is sufficient for 220 to 240 graves, while the ministry has been suffering for years from a severe crisis in providing sufficient areas of land to be designated as cemeteries, and the war has deepened the severity of the crisis.