Tiers of tombs are heaped deep below at a crowded Gaza cemetery, where Sa’di Baraka spends his days chopping at the earth to make place for additional bodies.

“Sometimes we make graves on top of graves,” he told me.At morning, Baraka and his solemn corps of volunteer gravediggers in the Deir al Balah cemetery begin digging new trenches or reopening existing ones. The dead might often arrive from miles away, in areas of the Gaza Strip where burial places have been devastated or are inaccessible.The cemetery is seventy years old. A fifth of the graves are new. The death toll in Gaza since the start of the 10-month-old Israel-Hamas conflict has surpassed 40,000, according to the Hamas-run territory’s Health Ministry. The count does not distinguish between civilians and militants.

The little, intensively populated sliver of land is now overflowing with bodies. They fill morgues and overrun cemeteries. According to witness testimony and video footage, families fleeing Israel’s attacks routinely bury their dead wherever they can, including in backyards and parking lots, beneath staircases, and along roadsides. Others lie beneath debris, their family unclear whether they will ever be counted.

‘One big cemetery’:

Since October, roughly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population has died. According to health officials and civil defense workers, the true toll could be thousands higher, including dead under rubble weighing 40 million tons, as reported by the United Nations.

“It seems,” Palestinian novelist Yousri Alghoul wrote for the Institute for Palestine Studies, “that Gaza’s fate is to become one large cemetery, with its streets, parks, and homes, where the living are merely dead awaiting their turn.”

Israel began hitting Gaza after Hamas-led terrorists rushed across the Israeli border on October 7, killing about 1,200 Palestinians and kidnapping 250 more. Israel aspires to destroy Hamas and claims its attacks are purely directed at militants. It accuses Hamas for civilian casualties, claiming that the militants operate from tunnel-filled residential communities. The conflict has killed 329 Israeli soldiers. Israel’s offensives have uprooted Palestinians even after their deaths.

Palestinians relocate bodies, protecting them from the route of war. According to satellite imagery obtained by investigative outlet Bellingcat, Israel’s military has excavated, plowed over, and blasted more than 20 graves. Troops have transported scores of bodies into Israel in pursuit of hostages. When the bodies are trucked back to Gaza, they are generally deteriorated and unidentified before being buried in a mass grave.

Israel’s military told the Associated Press that it is working to recover hostage bodies where intelligence suggests they may be. It stated that bodies found not to be hostages are returned “with dignity and respect.”

Haneen Salem, a photojournalist and writer from northern Gaza, claims to have lost around 270 extended family members as a result of bombardment and shelling. Salem said 15 to 20 of them had been disinterred, some after troops demolished cemeteries and others transferred by families who were afraid Israeli forces would destroy their graves. “I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to see the bodies of my loved ones lying on the ground, their bodies dispersed a piece of flesh here and bone there,” she told me. “After the war, if we remain alive, we will dig a new grave and spread roses and water over it for their good souls.”