Under the sun, half a dozen men line up concrete blocks in the sand to form a row of rectangles: these are the graves of the future dead of the Gaza Strip.
Previously, Saadi Hassan Barakeh was the chief gravedigger of two cemeteries in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the small Palestinian territory that has been bombarded by Israel for more than ten months.
“The Ansar cemetery is now completely full. There were too many martyrs,” says the 63-year-old Palestinian, 28 of whom were spent digging graves marked out with a line.
Once the three and a half hectares of Ansar were saturated, he concentrated on al-Sueid, another cemetery, this one of five and a half hectares.
But even with just one site compared to two before the war launched by Israel on October 7 after the deadly Hamas attack on Israeli soil the same day, he does not stop. “From 6am to 6pm, every day,” he tells AFPTV.
“Before the war, every week we had one or two burials, five at the most. Today, there are weeks when I bury 200 or 300 people, it’s unimaginable,” confides the gravedigger, his head covered with a white skullcap matching his long beard.
“Never seen that”
His black djellaba is rolled up over pants that were beige before being covered in sand and dust that he stirs up all day long.
“The cemetery is so full that now they dig graves on top of graves, they put the dead on floors,” continues the man who has lived through “all the wars in Gaza” but says he has “never seen anything like it.”
At the forefront of misfortune, Mr. Barakeh continues to encourage the 12 workers who help him dig, arrange and close dozens of graves a day. But in the evening, images haunt him.
“I can’t sleep after seeing so many bodies of children torn to pieces and women killed,” he explains, shovel in hand. “There is one family where I buried 47 women. There were 16 who were pregnant,” he continues.
After the October 7 attack that killed 1,198 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas, which is in power in Gaza.
In retaliation, Israeli army bombings have killed more than 40,000 people in the small besieged Palestinian territory – after 17 years of Israeli blockade – according to the Hamas government’s health ministry.
“I buried a lot of women and children, and only two or three guys from Hamas,” the Palestinian Islamist movement that recently named Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 attack, as its leader, Mr. Barakeh said.
“Why children?”
If the Israelis “have a problem with Sinwar, why do they attack the children? Let them kill Sinwar and all the others, but why the women and children?” the Gazan fumes.
Around him, white tombstones spread out all around, while in the few spaces that are still empty, men are busy digging new holes, their faces sweating.
Others bring to the assembly line concrete blocks, the price of which has skyrocketed – “one shekel before the war compared to 10 or 12 today,” Mr. Barakeh says, because factories are at a standstill due to lack of electricity and raw materials.
Heaps of freshly turned earth bear witness to recent burials.
Except for the gravediggers and other laborers carrying concrete blocks, no one comes anymore.
“Before the war, we could have a thousand people attending a person’s funeral, today, there are days when we bury 100 people and there are not even 20 people to bury them,” laments Mr. Barakeh.
Above his head, the drone of drones is incessant. One more memento mori in Gaza.