Gaza, Rafa, Cairo:
“My life, my eyes, my soul,” a man writes on the white shroud he wrapped around his wife after the devastating war in Gaza claimed her life.
A grieving son writes “my mother and everything” on the grave cloth covering his mother, one of more than 21,000 Palestinians killed in the confrontation between Israel and Hamas.
Over the past 12 weeks, the piece of white cloth has become a symbol of the civilian deaths Israel has inflicted in retaliation for Hamas killing 1,200 people and taking 240 hostages during the October 7 cross-border attack, the deadliest day in Israel's history Israel.
While the besieged Palestinian region faces severe shortages of food, water and medicine, there is still an abundant supply of the white coverings used to wrap dead Palestinians.
Not all shrouds carry loving words. The chaos of war is so great that some of the dead cannot be immediately identified.
In such cases, the shrouds are marked with the words “unknown man” or “unknown woman”, and before burial, photographs are taken and the date and place of the strike documented so that individuals can later be identified by relatives.
If the conflict escalates, the supply of white clothing donated by Arab governments and charities is expected to keep pace with demand. But there are difficulties caused by the sheer number of deaths, and sometimes there are gaps in the local availability of the shrouds.
“The challenges we face are too great. There is a shortage of knives and scissors that we need to prepare and cut the shrouds,” said Mohammed Abu Mussa, a volunteer with the Keratan Society, which prepares dead bodies for burial.
KNIVES, SCISSORS, COTTON
“As you know, there is a blockade and there are no materials in the Gaza Strip, so we find it difficult to get knives, scissors and cotton,” he said, adding that so many people are dying that donated shrouds are sometimes not enough and he must wrap four out of five people in one shroud.
Marwan Al-Hams, director of Abu Yousef Al Najjar Hospital, said the presence of the shrouds indicates Gaza's suffering.
“The large number of martyrs made the white shroud a symbol of this war and became parallel to the Palestinian flag in terms of its influence and the world's knowledge of the significance of our cause,” he said.
The white covering goes back to a story of the prophet Mohammed, who encouraged his followers to wear white clothing and also wrap the dead in white.
Shrouds from Arab donors come with a bar of soap, perfume, cotton and eucalyptus, to prepare the bodies for burial, a doctor at a hospital in the southern city of Rafah told Reuters.
In Gaza, in normal times, as soon as someone dies, a family member goes to the market and buys a “Kafan”, or shroud.
SCENES OF CHAOS
But for Abdel-Hamid Abdel-Atti, a local journalist, the trial in wartime Gaza began amid scenes of chaos and destruction, with the bodies of six of his loved ones, including his mother and brother, recovered from the rubble.
The six were killed on December 7 in an Israeli attack on the Al-Nusseirat refugee camp in the center of the Gaza Strip. The attack destroyed a building on top of them while they slept.
Describing the procedure as the most painful experience of his life, he retrieved shrouds from a hospital and wrapped them around the bodies of his relatives.
“The first one I did was my brother, the rest came wrapped in blankets and I asked that they not be taken off. I put the shrouds over the blankets and tied them carefully before saying goodbye,” Abdel-Atti said. Reuters.
“As I wrapped them in shrouds, I wondered what their guilt was… Why did Israel kill them while they slept in peace?”
The only consolation, he said, was that his relatives are going to heaven. “White looks like peace, looks like calm. It is part of our tradition and faith and through white veils it is as if we are asking God to remove and purify all their sins and accept them in heaven,” Abdel-Atti said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)