Israel systematically destroyed over 93 per cent of Gaza Strip cemeteries amid ongoing genocide
Palestinians inspect a cemetery damaged in Israeli shelling in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, 2 June 2025
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports on 15 March 2026:
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 analysed 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 criminalisation 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.