Death Toll Reaches 40 Thousand: Funerals In Gaza Are Full, One Day 300 Bodies Can Be Buried

The death toll of civilians in Gaza. (Wikimedia Commons/Fars Media Corporation/Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif)

JAKARTA - The death toll that continues to grow due to the conflict in the Gaza Strip, Palestine, has made burials in the enclave full, many families unable to bury their family members.

Saad Hassan Barakat, a funeral worker in Gaza City, said that although he had a lot of experience in funeral work, he had never faced a crisis of this magnitude.

Barakat said that before the war, he held several funerals every day. Since the Israeli-Hamas conflict broke out on October 7 last year, he sometimes buried 70, 80, 100 or up to 300 bodies in one day.

He described how the bodies were now buried in layers at the cemetery.

"The difficulty is that there is no room left to dig graves, so I piled up one grave above another," he told Anadolu, as quoted by the Daily Sabah on August 23.

"This place is not just one or two, but three layers of the grave," he said.

Barakat, who previously oversees nine funerals in the area, said he could now only access two funerals due to ongoing bombings.

"The bombing continues day and night," he said.

He added that the bodies were buried in mass graves free of charge. Meanwhile, those who ask for individual graves must pay around 300 shields.

Meanwhile, Mohammed Abdullah, a Palestinian who fled the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, said Israeli military intense attacks had made it increasingly difficult to bury bodies.

"The number of martyrs is terrible and continues to rise," Abdullah said.

"In the smallest massacre, we lost 10 or 20 people. In the central region of Gaza, there were only three funerals, and all of them were packed," he explained.

Abdullah recounted recent efforts to bury eight bodies, of which the bodies previously buried were recovered.

He noted that the graves were not only filled with bodies but also with living bodies, because people who fled sought refuge in the available places.

Separately, medical sources in Gaza said on Thursday that Israeli forces' attacks in the past 24 hours left at least 42 Palestinians dead and 163 others injured, quoted from WAFA.

This condition brings the death toll of Palestinians since the latest conflict in Gaza broke out on October 7, 2023, has risen to 40,265, while 93,144 others have been injured, the majority of victims are women and children.