Twenty-year-old Omar al-Sawhi has to find a burial place for his father, Mohammad, 40, who was shot dead close to the “Yellow Line”, an Israeli-designated military zone in Gaza. Mohammad, from the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, was working at a small roadside stall selling tea and coffee when a bullet struck him in the neck on June 10, killing him almost instantly. Omar headed to the Zeitoun Cemetery to bury his father and found the graves tightly packed together, many of them victims of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Many of them are marked with just a stone and a piece of paper attached bearing the name of the deceased, due to a lack of space and the difficult conditions caused by the war. There were mountains of sand, with people buried underneath,” Omar told Al Jazeera. The complete breakdown of services in Gaza and the dangers from Israeli attacks meant that thousands of dead Palestinians have been counted as “missing” during the war.
Many of them were buried in gardens, or tents, or the grounds of camps for the displaced, schools or hospitals. After a relative reduction in Israeli violence in Gaza following the United States-brokered ceasefire in October 2025, families began to recover their dead loved ones from the debris of destroyed homes or temporary burial sites. At least 1,200 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire was announced, every one of them needing a space for burial.
Authorities in Gaza said the remains of 529 Palestinians were recovered from seven mass graves in the grounds of hospitals. Taking advantage of the brief lull in Israeli violence, his family excavated Mohammad’s remains and moved them to a cemetery for a final burial. The shortage of graves is not just due to the more than 73,000 Palestinians killed since the war on Gaza began in October 2023, but also the destruction of burial sites by Israel.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, more than 40 cemeteries have been destroyed since the war began. Israeli forces have also enforced tight restrictions on access to cemeteries in areas under their control, which has further reduced the number of burial spaces available to families. With hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forced from their homes by Israeli bombing and forced displacement orders, areas previously designated for burial sites have been converted into shelters for the displaced.
Authorities in Gaza say that shortages of materials, such as headstones, mean the cost of burial now ranges between 700 ($235) and 1,000 shekels ($335). Masonry from destroyed buildings, mud, or corrugated metal sheets are used as temporary grave markers until the money can be found for a proper gravestone. Ikrami al-Madallal, a media official at the Endowments Ministry, said many of Gaza’s 60 cemeteries were already at full capacity when the war began.
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