As families retrieve bodies, Gaza is running out of places to bury the dead

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.

“I stood in the middle of the cemetery and saw so many graves. There were mountains of sand, with people buried underneath,” Omar told Al Jazeera.

“A grave was just a stone with a piece of paper bearing the name of the martyr, without the grave being built or properly prepared as it was before the war.”

A grave here currently costs about 500 shekels ($167), a sum his family could not afford, so they had to find an alternative.

“There was also no space for a new grave, so we had to bury him in my grandfather’s grave,” he said.

Burying the dead

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.

Al-Sahwi family make food in their tent [Hisham Zamo/Al Jazeera]

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.

Palestinians visit the graves of their loved ones in Deir el-Balah cemetery [Hisham Zamo/Al Jazeera]

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.

“We need to establish new cemeteries because of the shortage of available burial space,” he told Al Jazeera.

The ministry is searching for new burial grounds, and transferring bodies from temporary places of rest to cemeteries is an ongoing challenge for authorities.

“The transfer of bodies cannot be carried out randomly. It must be coordinated with the Ministry of Endowments, local government and the relevant government authorities,” he said.

Tafesh Abu Hatab, 50, who has worked as a gravedigger for more than 19 years, said the war on Gaza has been the most difficult period of his career.

Khan Younis Cemetery, where he works, had about 60 graves at the beginning of the war. Now it contains 6,000, and at one stage of the war, Tafesh was preparing about 35 graves a day.

“We have never experienced a period of bloodshed this devastating,” he told Al Jazeera. “Not a day passes without dozens of martyrs being buried.”

Many of the dead he handles are women and children, including infants. Sometimes the bodies of whole families enter the cemetery after an Israeli bomb obliterates an entire building, vehicle, or tent.

“They destroy our homes over our heads, and from the rubble of those homes, we build our graves,” he said.