Israel has destroyed 67 percent of Gaza’s cemeteries: Ministry

In a detailed statement issued on Friday, the ministry noted that since the start of the war in October 2023, occupation forces had either completely or partially destroyed roughly 40 out of Gaza’s 60-strong cemeteries.

It further denounced Zionist regime’s forces for perpetrating a new crime by storming the historic Turkish cemetery in the al-Mawasi area west of the city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.

According to the ministry, Zionist regime’s tanks and bulldozers rolled into the site at dawn on Thursday, demolishing graves and exhuming corpses.

The ministry condemned the outrage as “a scene that transcends the limits of humanity and [is] devoid of all religious and international values and norms,” noting that occupation forces had not only destroyed graves, but also “stole the bodies of martyrs and the dead.”

The atrocity, the statement lamented, had violated both divine law and international conventions

The assault coincided with Israeli forces demolishing camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) encircling the cemetery, uprooting hundreds of families, who had sought refuge there from relentless bombardment.

The ministry stressed that such coordinated attacks deepened Gaza’s already catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

‘Pursuing Palestinians even in their graves’

It asserted that the Zionist regime targeted cemeteries “under flimsy pretexts,” laying bare the extent of, what it lambasted as, the occupation’s “moral decadence,” which now pursues Palestinians “even in their graves.”

Calling on international legal bodies and human rights organizations, the ministry demanded an urgent investigation, immediate measures to halt these violations, and accountability for crimes against both the living and the dead across the Palestinian territories.

It, meanwhile, pledged that, despite mounting tragedies, the Palestinian people would persist in defending their land, sacred sites, and the dignity of their dead.

Also on Friday, Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, painted an equally harrowing picture of life -- and death -- in Gaza under the ongoing Israeli onslaught.

Following the Zionist regime’s military’s killing of 15 people, including nine children, as they waited for food aid in the city of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza on Wednesday, Lazzarini warned that the territory had become “the graveyard of children and starving people.”

He regretted that the Israeli regime was executing “the most cruel and Machiavellian scheme to kill, in total impunity,” forcing Palestinians to choose between “two deaths: Starvation or being shot at.”

The official also declared that international norms and values were themselves “being buried” in Gaza, cautioning that global inaction would only deepen the crisis.

Meanwhile, nearly 170 NGOs have called for an end to the Israeli- and US-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) program, which has overseen chaotic food distributions often targeted by Israeli gunfire.

The UN rights office has documented nearly 800 Palestinians martyred by Zionist regime’s forces while seeking aid, mostly at GHF-run sites.

Rights campaigners say the sites represent an effort on the part of Washington and Zionist regime to imply humanitarianism and whitewash the sheer outrageous nature of the war that has so far martyred more than 57,700 Palestinians and wounded over 137,600 others.

Besides the human toll, the brutal military onslaught has ravaged the territory, forcing over two million Palestinians to live across less than 15 percent of Gaza’s land due to mass displacements.