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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