ONE family buried a son over his grandfather. Another bundled up the tiny bodies of three young cousins and lowered them into the grave of a long-dead aunt. A man was laid to rest with his brother.
More than two weeks into the Israeli offensive that has now killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, Gazans are struggling to find places to bury their dead.
Cemeteries that were closed to new burials have reopened, and residents pry open graves of re
latives to cram in the newly dead. Yesterday, an Israeli jet fighter bombed one of those graveyards – the packed Sheikh Radwan cemetery in Gaza City, sending body parts flying on to houses and blasting craters into the graveyard. "Gaza is all a graveyard," said Salman Omar, a gravedigger.
After the bombing, residents collected charred body parts and placed them back into the crater that was all that remained of 30 graves. The area smelled of rotting and charred flesh, residents said. "There was flesh on the roofs, there were bits of intestines. My neighbour found a hand of a woman who died a long time ago; we put it all into a plastic bag," said Ahmad Abu Jarbou, a resident. As he left his house to see what had happened, he realised he was stepping on bits of flesh, he said.
The Israeli army said the strike targeted a weapons storeroom adjacent to the cemetery, and a separate strike targeted a spot from which rockets are often launched. The damage caused to the cemetery was either from secondary explosions from the storeroom or from the force of the blast, the army claimed.
