Palestinians Still Unable
To Bury Rafah Dead
By Cynthia Johnston
23 May, 2004
Reuters
RAFAH, Gaza Strip - On a blood-stained floor in a makeshift morgue in Rafah, the bodies of 16 Palestinians killed in Israel's bloodiest Gaza Strip raid in years lie in white shrouds, waiting to be buried.
Muslims traditionally bury their dead swiftly, but the morgue has held some bodies for nearly a week because family members, sealed off by Israeli tanks in Rafah's Tel al-Sultan neighbourhood, have been unable to collect them.
"These two are brothers," a morgue worker said on Sunday as he held open the heavy metal door of a produce freezer that normally holds vegetables and flowers. "They died in the first day of the siege." That was on Tuesday.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA has urged Israel to give relatives permission to leave Tel al-Sultan for the burials. But so far the families have been unable to do so.
An Israeli army spokesman said the army had authorised buses to take relatives of the dead from Tel al-Sultan to Rafah, but did not know when that might happen.
Israeli troops have killed 42 Palestinians since the raid, which has drawn international criticism, began on Tuesday. More than 1,600 people have been made homeless.
Rafah residents say Israeli forces have destroyed some 35 homes and damaged dozens, while the Israeli army says it razed five homes and that others were wrecked or damaged during battles with militants.
Israel launched the incursion, its largest in Gaza in years, to search for tunnels used to smuggle in weapons from neighbouring Egypt, after 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in the space of a week and a separate attack claimed the life of a settler woman and her four children in Gaza.
ONE LAST GOOD BYE
In Tel al-Sultan, witnesses said the army had pulled out its armoured vehicles but continued to cut off access roads to the rest of the Rafah refugee camp.
Residents have been without power or running water for days. A brother and sister shot dead on their rooftop in Tel al-Sultan last week were buried side by side in Rafah on Friday, although their parents were unable to attend the funeral.
Family members of other dead insisted on seeing their relatives one final time before burying them.
"There has to be a last look," said Zeidan Shabana, who said his 23-year-old brother Ziyad, a fighter, was the first to die in Tel al-Sultan.
"We don't want anything from the world. We just want to bury our martyrs. My parents are in Tel al-Sultan. How can we bury him. Where is the humanity?"
Physician Manar Thhair, who arranged for the bodies to be transferred to the makeshift morgue, said most of the remaining dead were men from Tel al-Sultan killed by Israeli gunfire.
"All the children and the women they took for burial," he said.
The Muslim mufti of Rafah, Sheikh Hassan Jaber, said he wanted the families to come together by bus from Tel al-Sultan to bury their loved ones soon before the bodies deteriorate.
"Islamic law maintains that the martyrs must be buried quickly," he said. "The relatives must see them and bury them."