Even the dead have not been spared from Gaza’s raging Hamas-Israel war, with Israeli forces exhuming bodies and hastily burying them in hospitals and even schools.

Palestinian bodies exhumed from graves are covered with shrouds in the muddy ground in Gaza City’s Tufa district.

The Israeli military had bulldozed the site and exhumed the bodies, according to an AFP photographer who visited the site earlier this month.

The Ministry of Religious Affairs in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip said the desecration was part of more than 2,000 graves damaged or destroyed by Israeli forces in the area.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the bulldozing of the cemetery when contacted by AFP for comment.

Responding to accusations that soldiers snatched bodies from graves, the military told AFP it acted “at specific locations where there was information indicating the possible presence of the bodies of hostages”.

“The bodies determined not to be hostages will be returned with dignity and respect,” it said in a statement.

The war broke out after a Hamas attack on October 7 that killed about 1,140 people in southern Israel, mostly civilians, according to official AFP statistics.

The militants also held 250 hostages, of which Israel said about 132 remained in Gaza, including at least 28 bodies.

Israel’s relentless military offensive has killed at least 26,637 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas government’s health ministry in Gaza.

“Their souls are shaking”

Saida Jaber recalled seeing videos on social media of the destroyed cemetery in Jabaliya refugee camp in a school packed with displaced people in the central Deir al-Balah region.

“I felt like my heart was going to stop,” Jaber told AFP, adding that her father, grandparents and other relatives were buried at the site in northern Gaza.

“I feel their souls shaking… I can’t imagine how anyone could dare to dig up graves and violate the sanctity of the dead,” Jaber said.

As the fighting continues, many Gazans are unable to visit official cemeteries and instead turn to makeshift cemeteries.

At a school-turned-shelter in the middle of the Magazi refugee camp, a woman touches the sand in the courtyard where her daughter is buried.

“My daughter died in my arms… We waited day and night and couldn’t get her to the emergency room,” said the unnamed woman.

She told AFP the rocket hit the school compound and ignited the gas canister, triggering the deadly explosion.

A man guarding the site said more than 50 people were buried there, with three or four bodies in each grave, their names either written on bricks or on a nearby wall.

“Death of Sorrow”

The death toll was so high that AFP reporters saw mass graves across Gaza.

They included rows of bodies buried on the grounds of Gaza’s largest hospital, Shifa, with graves separated by stones and plant branches.

“If we go to the cemetery, they (Israel) might bomb us and we will die,” said Arfan Dadar, 46, who lives with his family in a tent on the hospital compound.

Dadar said Israeli soldiers shot and killed his 22-year-old son when he returned to a Gaza City hospital.

“I marked his grave, but now the hospital park is crowded with mass graves. I can barely recognize my son’s grave,” he said.

Gazans say they hope the dead will be transferred when the war ends.

Wael al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, said he had “no choice” but to bury his son in a crowded neighborhood south of Rafah after the young journalist was killed in an Israeli attack. cemetery.

“After the war is over, we will move him to the Martyrs’ Cemetery in Gaza City. We want his grave to be closer to us so we can visit him and pray for him,” Dadouh said.

Jaber, who was displaced in Deir al-Bala, said she longed to return to Jabaliya to see the graves of her relatives.

“I would be heartbroken if they were washed away too,” she said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)