Deir el-Balah, Gaza – Before October 7, Saadi Hassan Sulieman Baraka, nicknamed Abu Jawad, had a routine.
He prayed the dawn prayer, had dukkah and zaatar with olive oil for breakfast, then headed east to Deir el-Balah to tend to his palm trees and olive trees. No more.
The 64-year-old is an Islamic undertaker, a job he did for decades before the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza. Today, this Palestinian, father of 10 and grandfather of 116, works long hours, burying more people per day than he ever thought possible.
Lost tranquility
Abu Jawad is one of the original residents of the Deir el-Balah refugee camp in central Gaza, where he lives in a small house with his wife and 104-year-old mother.
He is a simple, dynamic and generous man, nicknamed “the heartbeat of Deir el-Balah”, and he feels very deeply, mentally and physically, the upheaval of his quiet life.
“I lost 30 kg (66 lbs), I can neither sleep at night nor eat after my funeral. The images I see are… pure horror. They won’t leave my mind.
“I buried about 10 times more people during this war than in my 27 years as a funeral director. The minimum was 30 people and the maximum 800. Since October 7, I have buried more than 17,000 people.
“Every day the cemetery is filled with people crying at the graves of their loved ones or near their bodies waiting to be buried,” Abu Jawad said.
“Now my life is this,” says Abu Jawad. “I work at the cemetery from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., sometimes more. I prepare shrouds, build graves, lead funeral prayers, mourn, and bury.
“There are four displaced men from Khan Younis who are helping me. What we do is voluntary, we have been offered money, food and help, but we want nothing more than God’s reward and mercy for the martyrs we bury daily.
“The fact that almost all of our funerals are collective is absolutely heartbreaking; most of them included missing families. We prepare large family graves in anticipation of a massacre. We only have two cemeteries in Deir el-Balah; one is now completely full and the other is running out of space.
“We are the dead”
The day a short ceasefire began in November, Abu Jawad remembers having to bury 800 people, most of them children.
“We rounded them up in pieces, their bodies so riddled with holes it was as if Israeli snipers were using them as target practice. Others were crushed like… like a boiled potato and many had huge facial burns.
“We couldn’t really tell one person’s body from another, but we did our best. We dug a large deep grave, probably 10 meters (30 feet) deep, and buried them together.
“Normally, we can write the name of the deceased on their shroud and their loved ones can come and pray for them. But these 800 people did not have relatives to visit them,” chokes Abu Jawad in the face of this painful memory.
He goes on to describe how he almost has to deliberately shut off his emotions in order to carry out his daily tasks of providing comfort to families while he buries their loved ones.
“For me, those who are killed are still alive and we are the dead because we die slowly. There is no way to live here; no water, no food, no electricity, no peace, nothing at all. Is this a life?
“Almost every day I see someone who does not leave the grave of their beloved. I leave and come back just to see them still sobbing from their deep loss.
For a family, bringing their dead to the cemetery is not an easy task. There are many reports of people burying their dead in their yards because they could not venture into the street with the body.
“It takes days, a week, weeks for a family to bring their loved ones to the cemetery. Sometimes it’s because there were no tools to remove bodies from the rubble of a destroyed house, sometimes it’s because they can’t find shrouds or anything else to wrap the bodies.
“I buried 67 members of my family; the hardest part was my cousins, to whom I was very close. Their bodies were destroyed, they were in pieces. I didn’t recognize any of them.
“Despite the magnitude of the loss and the horror I see every day, I cannot stop and I never will.
“Stop this genocide!” We want a peaceful life. I want to leave and return home safely every day, without fighting famine and war at the same time.
