Every day, Umm Omar dials her late husband's number, playing along with her four-year-old daughter who is unaware that her father was killed at the start of the Gaza war. Little Ella 'wants us to call him, to tell him about her day,' Umm Omar explained. She has taken her three children to Al Mawasi, a coastal region in the southern Gaza Strip, where many displaced Palestinians have gathered.
Over 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants erupted on October 7, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The hostilities were sparked by Hamas's assault on southern Israel, which led to the deaths of 1,198 people, as per an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures. Umm Omar, speaking to AFP, expressed her bewilderment at how 'the months have flown by' since her husband, Ibrahim Al Shanbari, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza. She described losing everything 'in a fraction of a second' but had little time to properly bury him, grieve, or come to terms with the loss of the 'kind' man he was. There was no funeral procession or 'any of the usual mourning rituals because it's wartime,' she added.
'It was very difficult to say goodbye... because the martyrs were buried very quickly,' she said, amidst ongoing fighting across the besieged territory. To help Ella, 'I ended up pretending' her father was still alive, Umm Omar recounted. However, she noted that others had it worse, 'those who have lost an entire family, those who have not been able to say goodbye, or those who find their children in pieces.'
With more than 1.5 percent of Gaza's 2.4 million population killed during the war, many have lost loved ones. The scent of death permeates the air, yet under relentless bombardment, shelling, and battles, Gazans often lack the time or intact places to grieve. Some perished from blood loss before reaching hospitals, many of which were rendered inoperable due to the fighting or severe shortages due to the Israeli siege imposed early in the war. Others were crushed beneath their collapsed homes, their bodies eventually pulled from the rubble of bombed-out neighborhoods. Some are still missing, feared entombed under the ruins.
To Mustafa Al Khatib, 56, who has lost several relatives, 'death has replaced life.' The continuous violence has made many cemeteries inaccessible, often forcing Gazans to dig makeshift graves with whatever tools they can find, Khatib told AFP. And 'there are no stones or cement to make a concrete covering for the grave either,' he said. The hurried burial of Khatib's uncle in a hospital yard has left him with a 'heavy heart,' he said. His sister was interred in a long-abandoned cemetery, which Khatib said was later bombed.
In central Gaza's Al Maghazi refugee camp, a woman touched the ground outside a school used as a displacement shelter: this is where she said her daughter was buried after dying in her arms, fatally wounded in a blast. With nearly all Gazans displaced at least once by the war, and often far from home, they have resorted to burying family members on any available patch of land, in the street, or sometimes on football fields. Many do not know when they may be able to return to their burial spots or even find them again.
In the nearly 10 months since the war began, AFP correspondents have witnessed mass burials and bodies put in the ground in blood-stained blankets. Some were wrapped in plastic sheets, marked with a number rather than a name, either because the bodies were unrecognizable or because no relatives had come to claim them. Across the ravaged territory, which had already suffered for years under a crippling Israeli-led blockade and past cycles of violence, hasty burials are now conducted daily in the midst of fighting, evacuation orders, and hazardous journeys to find food, water, and medical care. Khatib said he had 'grown accustomed' to the often chaotic and fleeting farewells before friends and family return to their daily task of survival. Some never had the chance to say goodbye. Gazans interviewed by AFP have struggled or were outright unable to express their grief and loss. Many said they await their own death to rejoin relatives.
For more than six months, Ali Khalil has known that his 32-year-old son Mohammed was killed in the bombing of his home in the Al Shati refugee camp, on the outskirts of Gaza City. But he had fled for safety with his grandchildren to the coastal territory's south when he heard the news. 'What hurts me the most is not having been able to bury my son, not having hugged him and not having said goodbye to him,' said the grieving 54-year-old man. 'I wonder if his body remained intact or if it was in pieces. I have no idea.'
