One day, my 13-year-old brother woke up struggling to breathe, and he told us that he saw our grandfather in a dream. Our grandfather passed away in 2017 and is buried in Al-Sharqiya Cemetery, located east of Gaza City near the occupied border. In the dream, my grandfather told him that he had lost his leg when a bomb hit his grave.
No one knows what has happened to Al-Sharqiya Cemetery during the genocide. It is the biggest cemetery in Gaza, where most Gazan civilians are buried. No one can reach it because it is in an unsafe area where Israeli snipers target anyone who tries to approach. But now, every Gazan wants to know what happened to it because everyone fears that the cemetery has been bulldozed and destroyed.
One man shared with me: “Our relatives and loved ones are buried there; we have the right to check on them and know their fate.” Another man, a father of five martyrs, told me, “We must learn what has happened to our martyrs so we can relocate them in a respectful way to graves in a suitable place.” In a sad voice, a woman in the street said, “We don’t know where our dead lie, nor when our turn will come to join them.”
The occupation shows no respect for Palestinians, living or dead. It seems that even our resting places are a threat to them. They targeted part of the old and historic Ibn Marwan Cemetery, which is near the Al-Shujaiya neighborhood where I live. I saw with my own eyes the destroyed graveyard with bones strewn around after a bombing. So, it’s very possible that Al-Sharqiya Cemetery has also been erased and desecrated.
During the genocide, we have barely found ways to bury our dead. None of the martyrs from the current genocide have been buried in Al-Sharqiya Cemetery because it is no longer accessible, but the recent martyrs of Gaza have been buried in several different ways. First, some are laid to rest in other old cemeteries, placed above old graves. Second, some are buried in the streets and in people’s yards. Third, some of them are still under the rubble of their homes. When their relatives searched for their bodies more than a year after their deaths, they found only bones. Moreover, thousands of martyrs have no graves; they were killed, their bodies torn apart or disappeared entirely. Many martyrs are still missing; no one knows where they are, where their bodies ended up, or even where and how they were killed. In addition, there are countless unmarked graves found in every corner of Gaza. Israel has also detained hundreds of martyrs’ remains. Parents want to bury their sons’ bodies in a dignified manner, but even this is not granted to them.
With entire areas strewn with rubble, some Gazans have set up tents to live with their families above some of Ibn Marwan cemetery’s disturbed graves. How can a child sleep at night in a yard that once was filled with the dead? How can a girl seek refuge alone in a bathroom when graves remain nearby? How can a father sleep without telling his children that their shelter stands above what was once a graveyard?
Imagine going to visit your grandfather’s grave one day only to find the headstone was gone as you walk across a shattered land that once held your loved ones. Now the place is devoid of markers, names, or memories. This isn’t a fictional story, but the harsh reality many people in Gaza face today. In Gaza, even the dead are not safe. People can’t even mourn at the graves of their loved ones because they can’t reach them, and if they can, all they find is rubble and bones.
Imagine going to visit your mother’s grave after your return from being displaced in the south of Gaza only to find that the headstone has been shattered, the cemetery erased. Then you find a man who told you that the occupation’s bombs and missiles had obliterated even the newly built cemetery that people created during the war. He had collected the scattered bones and put them together in one mass grave.
Imagine seeing all your recently departed family members buried in a mass grave, then hearing that an invasion happened where your ancestors’ graves were located. After days, weeks or months, you go there just to find your ancestors’ remains in a different place, their bodies destroyed and their shrouds in tatters on the ground.
This genocide must be stopped, so that our city that was once a calm place for both the living and the dead will stop being a rubble-strewn necropolis. We need to feel safe; we need to go to sleep feeling sure that we will wake in the morning, we need to see the future that we dreamed of as children. We need to go to our cemeteries to honor and remember our dead.
Global Charade: Israel, Palestine And The ‘Rules-Based Order’
The post-WW2 ‘international rules-based order’ that supposedly underpins global affairs in the interests of peace, democracy and prosperity has always been largely a charade. But Israel’s continuing Gaza genocide, carried out with seeming impunity and with the complicity and even active participation of the US and its allies, has exposed the charade like never before.
Twenty years ago, at the 2005 World Summit, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ or ‘R2P’. The key concerns were to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Whenever populations are at risk of such crimes, the international community is supposed to take collective action ‘in a timely and decisive manner’ to prevent mass atrocities from taking place.
In practice, only some massacres matter, whether threatened or actual: namely, those that can be exploited by Western powers to further their own geostrategic interests (for example, see our media alerts here and here). The Nato-led attack on Libya in 2011 is a textbook example. Western politicians and their cheerleaders across the media ‘spectrum’ declared that the world had to act to prevent a ‘bloodbath’ in Benghazi when Gaddafi’s forces there were allegedly threatening to massacre civilians.
In fact, the public were subjected to a propaganda blitz to promote the Perpetual War that had already wreaked havoc in Iraq, resulting in the deaths of over one million people, the virtual destruction of the Iraqi state and the proliferation of Al-Qaeda and other militia groups.
https://www.medialens.org/2025/global-charade-israel-palestine-and-the-rules-based-order/