Once a day, Umm Omar picks up the phone and calls her late husband, delighting her four-year-old daughter, who does not understand that her father was killed early in the Gaza war.
Little Ella “wants us to call her, tell her about our day,” said Umm Omar, who has fled with her three children to a coastal region called al-Mawasi, which is filled mostly with displaced Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip.
The death toll in Gaza has risen steadily since the war between Israel and Palestinian militants began on October 7, and has approached 40,000, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
The incident was triggered by Hamas attacks on southern Israel that day, which resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
Umm Omar told AFP she did not understand “how many months had passed” since her husband Ibrahim al-Shambari was killed in an Israeli attack on northern Gaza.
When he died, Umm Umar said she lost everything “in a fraction of a second,” but she had little time to bury him properly, mourn him, or grieve the loss of such a “kind” person as him.
Umm Umar said there was no funeral procession or “any normal mourning (rituals) because it was a time of war”.
“It was very hard to say goodbye … because the martyrs were buried very quickly,” he said, adding that there was heavy fighting in the besieged area.
To help Ella, “I pretended” that her father was still alive, Umm Omar said.
Still, according to him, the situation is even worse for others, “who have lost their entire family, who haven’t been able to say goodbye, or who have found their children in pieces”.
More than 1.5 percent of Gaza’s 2.4 million people were killed during the war, and many residents of the besieged coastal region lost loved ones.
The smell of death is everywhere, but because of the constant bombings, shelling and wars, Gazans often have little time to express their grief — or any place to go that isn’t turning into ruins.
– ‘Death has taken the place of life’ –
Some bled to death before reaching a hospital, many of whom had been invalided out of service because of the fighting or because of severe shortages caused by the Israeli siege early in the war.
Other victims were buried under their collapsed homes, their bodies eventually pulled from the rubble of bombed-out areas. Some people are still missing, feared buried under the ruins.
“Death has taken the place of life,” said Mustafa al-Khatib, 56, who has lost several relatives.
Khatib told AFP that ongoing violence has made many cemeteries impossible to access, often forcing Gazans to dig makeshift graves with whatever tools they can find.
“There is no concrete stone or even cement to cover the grave,” he said.
He said he was “deeply saddened” by the hasty burial of Khateeb’s uncle on the hospital premises.
His sister was buried in a long-abandoned cemetery, which Khatib said was later bombed.
In the al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, a woman placed her hand on the ground outside a school that serves as a displacement shelter: this was where, she said, her daughter was buried, who died in her arms after being badly injured in an explosion.
Nearly all Gazans have been displaced at least once due to the war, and often far from home, so they have resorted to burying their loved ones on any available land, in the street, or sometimes in football fields.
Many do not know when they will be able to return to or even locate their burial sites again.
– Longing for a last embrace –
In the nearly 10 months since the war began, AFP reporters have witnessed mass burials and scenes of bodies buried in the ground on blood-stained blankets.
Some bodies were wrapped in plastic sheets bearing numbers instead of names, either because they were unidentifiable or no relatives had come to collect them.
In the devastated region, already suffering from years of Israeli-led blockade and previous cycles of violence, bodies are now being hastily buried daily amid fighting, evacuation orders and dangerous journeys in search of food, water and medical care.
Khatib said he has become “addicted” to the often chaotic and fleeting farewells before friends and family return to the daily grind of living.
Some people never got the chance to say goodbye.
Gazans interviewed by AFP have struggled or been unable to express their grief and loss. Many said they are waiting for their death to meet their loved ones.
Ali Khalil has known for more than six months that his 32-year-old son Mohammed was killed in a bomb blast at their home in the al-Shati refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City.
But when he heard the news he was far away and fled with his grandchildren to the south along the coast to seek safety.
“What saddens me the most is that I couldn’t bury my son, hug him and say goodbye to him,” the grieving 54-year-old said.
“I wonder if his body remained intact or was blown to pieces. I have no idea.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
