Tag: palestine

Gaza City is home to landmarks such as the Church of Saint Porphyrius, the Great Mosque and Gaza’s al-Zawiya and gold markets.

These landmarks testify to Gaza’s archaeological history, religious significance and commercial heritage.

But throughout its genocide in the Gaza Strip, Israel has wreaked havoc on these places.

The Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius is located in Gaza City’s al-Zaytoon neighborhood, with roughly 20 Christian homes standing around it.

The church is believed to be the third-oldest in the world.

But its heritage and status as a place of worship didn’t deter Israel from bombing the church on 19 October 2023, targeting the church’s annex building and killing 17 Palestinian Christians who were sheltering there.

“It was the greatest catastrophe of our lives,” Fuad Ayyad, a Christian working at the church, told The Electronic Intifada.

“I can still see the faces and bodies of the martyrs I collected with my own hands, the children I buried myself,” Ayyad, 44, said. “It was the first time in our history that a church – a house of worship – was directly targeted.”

The Christian community sought refuge in Gaza’s churches during the genocide.

More than 400 sought refuge in Saint Porphyrius, while a few hundred meters away, the Latin convent, which comprises the Catholic Holy Family Church, sheltered around 500 others.

On 16 December 2023, an Israeli sniper fatally shot two Christian women while they were sheltering at the Holy Family Church.

On 18 July 2025, an Israeli artillery shell struck the Holy Family Church, killing three Christians.

Churches weren’t safe havens only for Christians.

The Saint Porphyrius Church, Ayyad said, was also housing Palestinian Muslims.

But “the Israeli army makes no distinction between a Christian or a Muslim,” Ayyad said.

The 19 October 2023 bombing, he said, killed another Muslim man who was sheltering at the church.

“The church lost its majesty, but it still carries the memory of coexistence and love,” Ayyad said, referring to the 2014 Gaza war when the church sheltered Palestinian Muslims during Ramadan, Muslims’ holy month, where they broke their fasts and worshiped god.

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Illegal Israeli settlers continued their violent attacks across the occupied West Bank on 23 March, after several destructive pogroms targeted Palestinian villages over the weekend.

Palestinian farmers and shepherds in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, came under attack by settlers on Monday. 

“Muhammad Yahya Abu Aram, 35, and Elias Saeed al-Amour suffered from suffocation and fainting after colonists sprayed them with pepper spray following an attack on shepherds and farmers in the western part of Al-Rakeez village in Masafer Yatta,” anti-settlement activist Osama Makhameh told WAFA news agency. 

Groups of settlers also uprooted scores of olive trees in Beita, south of Nablus, on Monday, while also raiding a school in Huwara – spray painting graffiti on the walls and replacing the Palestinian flag with an Israeli one.

Overnight, a health clinic in Burqa, east of Ramallah, was torched by settlers. 

As the war on Iran rages and Tehran continues its large-scale retaliatory campaign against Israel, extremist settler violence against Palestinians – which was already at an all-time high – is now surging. 

Israeli settlers rampaged through multiple Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank overnight on 21 March, smashing cars, burning homes, and attacking and injuring Palestinians who were defending their homes.

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Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has documented that the Israeli army has destroyed 93.5 per cent of cemeteries in the Gaza Strip, either completely or partially, in the context of the ongoing genocide since October 2023.

The systematic targeting of graves through demolition and bulldozing constitutes a grave violation of international humanitarian law and reflects a deliberate pattern of erasure. These actions violate the sanctity of the dead, erase physical traces, inflict severe psychological and spiritual harm on the living, and ultimately undermine collective memory, severing historical ties between the population, their ancestors, and their land.

The Euro-Med Monitor team analyzed data from 62 official cemeteries across the Gaza Strip’s five governorates. It found that the Israeli army completely bulldozed and destroyed graves in 39 cemeteries (approximately 62.9 per cent of the total) and partially damaged 19 others (approximately 30.6 per cent). Only four cemeteries, or 6.4 per cent, remain intact.

These findings show that the widespread, direct destruction of cemeteries in the Gaza Strip was neither incidental to military operations nor justified by “military necessity.” Rather, it was a deliberate, planned effort to obstruct the identification and documentation of remains and to disrupt any subsequent procedures for identification, examination, or lawful exhumation. This constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law, which requires the respectful treatment of the dead, the protection and maintenance of graves, the recording of identity data, and the clear marking of burial sites to enable later identification.

The bulldozing and vandalism have led to the mixing of remains and the destruction of graves, markers, and headstones, making identification of the deceased nearly impossible, given Gaza’s limited resources. This deliberately deprives families of their humanitarian and religious right to know the fate and burial sites of their loved ones and to visit them, causing profound and lasting psychological and spiritual harm.

These acts, beyond constituting grave violations of the rules protecting the dead and cemeteries, fall within the scope of international criminalization when committed as outrages upon human dignity. This includes “outrages upon personal dignity,” a term which extends to the treatment of the deceased.

This pattern goes beyond violating the sanctity of the dead; it strikes at the foundations of collective memory, historical continuity, and connection to the land by removing the physical markers of Palestinian generational continuity, in line with systematic policies of erasure and removal.

The geographical distribution of the attacks indicates a widespread strategy of spatial erasure. In Rafah governorate, all official cemeteries have been completely destroyed. In Khan Yunis, all 24 official cemeteries were targeted, with 83.3 per cent completely destroyed and 16.7 per cent partially destroyed. In North Gaza, all ten cemeteries have been destroyed, with half completely and half partially affected.

Similarly, all 11 cemeteries in the Gaza governorate were damaged, with 45.5 per cent completely destroyed and 54.5 per cent partially destroyed. In Central Gaza, four of the eight cemeteries were partially damaged, while the other four remained undamaged.

In many cases, the Israeli army deliberately exhumed graves and converted cemeteries into military barracks under the pretext of searching for the bodies of Israeli detainees. These actions were carried out without documented, verifiable procedures, independent oversight, or a clear chain of custody and handover process. Israeli forces removed hundreds of bodies from their burial sites, mixed remains, failed to return them to their original locations, and provided no identifying or biological data to enable verification or documentation, making the recovery and identification of remains extremely difficult.

In addition to violating the sanctity of the dead, this conduct reflects a pattern of dehumanization, treating Palestinian bodies as objects to be confiscated, mixed, and concealed rather than as remains of human beings with names, dignity, and rights. It constitutes a compounded violation that strips the dead of dignity, reduces them to unidentified corpses, deprives families of their humanitarian and religious right to know the fate of their loved ones and perform mourning and burial rites, and undermines the preservation of historical and civil records linked to identity and burial.

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