GAZA – The Gaza Strip is witnessing an escalation in Israeli assassinations and targeted killings. This is coinciding with US diplomatic efforts to advance the second phase of the 15-point Roadmap. This situation places the negotiation process in a highly sensitive position and to a political test.
This situation assessment made by Ibrahim Al-Hawajri for the Palestinian Center for Political Studies, analyzes the timing of the wave of attacks in the Strip for August 2026 and the American efforts led by US envoy Jared Kushner. It emphasizes however, that this correlation does not prove there is a direct causal relationship, but warrants monitoring and analysis.
Negotiations Under Fire
In late July 2026, Hamas agreed to a 15-point American roadmap for implementing the Sharm el-Sheikh Protocol commitments. These included confining and storing the movement’s weapons, the withdrawal of Israeli forces, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian technocratic administration to manage the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli government conditioned any withdrawal on the “genuine” and prior disarmament of Hamas, while the American-Egyptian proposal linked disarmament to a parallel withdrawal and a simultaneous reconstruction process.
On 16 August, a meeting was held in El Alamein between Jared Kushner, Nikolay Mladenov, and Tony Blair on one side, and Khalil al-Hayya, Egyptian intelligence chief Major General Hassan Rashad, and Qatari Minister Ali al-Thawadi on the other. The meeting lasted approximately 90 minutes.
This political activity coincided with the continuation of Israeli airstrikes on areas in Gaza, before the wave of attacks intensified following Kushner’s return and his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Escalating Targeting
The assessment noted a series of targeted attacks against figures associated with the Palestinian security and military establishment, including the killing of Colonel Wael al-Ladawi and his assistant, Major Ramez Abu Zureiq, on 26 July when their vehicle was bombed in Deir al-Balah.
Late July saw the assassination of the director of the Jabalia refugee camp police station, along with six officers and personnel. Less than three weeks later, Brigadier General Abdel Nasser al-Maqadma, the police chief of North Gaza Governorate, was also killed.
Two Israeli airstrikes on 19 August in Gaza City killed 10 Palestinians, including nine in the bombing of the municipal police headquarters, among them a woman and a child. Around 20 others were wounded. An Israeli military source also reported that a “Qassam Brigades commander” was targeted in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
A joint statement issued by Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey on 20 August condemned the Israeli attacks and called on the Trump administration’s Middle East Peace Council to ensure the Israeli government’s full compliance with the ceasefire agreement.
On 23 August, the Israeli army and Shin Bet announced the assassination of Ismail Abu Foul in the Maghazi area, claiming he was responsible for manufacturing explosive devices and anti-tank missiles.
Negotiating Pressure and Imposing Facts on the Ground
The assessment presents three dimensions to the escalation coinciding with diplomatic activity. The first is providing political and media cover for the strikes while international attention is focused on de-escalation efforts.
The second dimension is the depletion of the Palestinian leadership and security apparatus, necessitating a reorganization of ranks in parallel with managing sensitive negotiations.
The third dimension is the reframing of the cessation of assassinations as a bargaining chip that can be used to extract concessions, rather than as a fundamental requirement in a ceasefire agreement.
The assessment indicates that the Israeli narrative presents the targeted killings as military operations aimed at rebuilding combat capabilities, while Hamas denies the military status of several of those targeted and describes the targeting of police stations as an attack on civilian infrastructure.
Three Possible Paths
The assessment suggests that assassinations will continue in parallel with negotiations in the short term, given the ongoing disagreement over the sequence of disarmament and withdrawal. This could lead to protracted negotiations, partial agreements, and intermittent escalations.
The assessment also suggests a moderate likelihood of actual US pressure to halt the assassinations if the Trump administration deems Israeli operations a threat to its political project in Gaza. This would improve the chances of implementing the next phase of the agreement.
The assessment places the collapse of the negotiating track as the least likely but most dangerous scenario. An escalation of strikes and a retaliatory response could lead to a return to open confrontation and the collapse of the ceasefire.
Conclusion
The assessment concludes that the escalation of assassinations following Kushner’s visit does not prove there is a joint US-Israeli decision to escalate, but rather reveals a conflict over the rules of engagement for the next phase.
It indicates that the occupying government seeks to maintain its instruments of force, assassination, and field pressure alongside the negotiating table, while Washington attempts to push the parties toward a new political formula.
The assessment confirms that the future of the Gaza negotiations will not be determined solely within the confines of Cairo and Washington, but also by the realities on the ground. The party capable of imposing facts on the ground will be best positioned to influence the shape of any agreement reached at the negotiating table according to the Palestinian Information Center.
CROSSFIREARABIA – By August 2026, scarcely a mosque in Gaza escaped the war. Ancient Mamluk sanctuaries, neighbourhood prayer halls and modern mosques were reduced to rubble, while worshippers, imams and religious scholars killed. The scale raises a question that goes beyond battlefield damage: Were all these buildings legitimate military objectives, or has part of Gaza’s religious and cultural landscape been destroyed?
In Gaza today, the absence of the minaret has become almost as noticeable as the presence of the rubble.
For generations the skyline of Gaza City, Jabalia, Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis and Rafah was punctuated by domes and slender minarets. Mosques were not merely buildings entered five times a day for prayer. They were landmarks by which neighbourhoods identified themselves, places where families met, children studied the Quran, charitable committees distributed assistance and generations marked births, marriages and deaths.
After nearly three years of Israeli military attacks, much of that religious landscape has disappeared.
The latest figures supplied by Gaza’s Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs and reported by the Palestine Information Center on 25 August 2026 state that 1,244 mosques out of the Gaza Strip’s 1,275 have been targeted since 7 October 2023. Of these, 1,077 have been completely destroyed.
That means roughly 98 percent of Gaza’s mosques have been struck or otherwise affected, according to the ministry, and about 84 percent of the entire pre-war stock of mosques has been completely destroyed.
The ministry says only a fraction of Gaza’s pre-war religious infrastructure is presently functioning normally. In August 2026 it reported 224 standing mosques and 428 temporary prayer spaces, many assembled from timber, canvas and whatever material could be salvaged from the ruins. Sixty-five damaged mosques had been provisionally made usable.
The figures have risen dramatically as the war has continued. In October 2024 the ministry reported 814 mosques completely destroyed and another 148 damaged. By February 2025 it said 834 were completely destroyed and 275 severely damaged. By August 2026 the complete-destruction count had risen to more than 1,070.
International organisations use more conservative figures because they count only sites they have individually verified. OHCHR reported that, according to the Gaza Ministry of Endowments, 995 mosques and three churches had been partly or completely destroyed by 31 May 2025. UNESCO, using satellite imagery and site assessments rather than accepting the entire ministry inventory, had independently verified damage to 164 cultural sites by March 2026, including important religious monuments.
The difference therefore does not necessarily mean one side is counting inaccurately. They are measuring different things: Gaza’s ministry is attempting a comprehensive administrative inventory, while UNESCO and other UN bodies generally record only individually verified cultural properties.
The assault began almost immediately
Some of the first mosques disappeared within 48 hours of the 7 October attacks.
At approximately 4:30 a.m. on 9 October 2023, Israeli warplanes struck the Sheikh Ahmed Yassin Mosque in Gaza City’s crowded al-Shati refugee camp. Human-rights documentation subsequently reviewed by Airwars says the four-storey mosque was completely destroyed and three civilians were killed — two women and a girl. Around a dozen others were reported injured.
Nearby, the Al-Gharbi Mosque was also destroyed. Palestinian documentation says several missiles struck the mosque and three civilians in the area were killed. Because several mosques in al-Shati were attacked in the same period, casualty attribution varies between reports.
Then came the Abdullah bin Omar, or Al-Sousi Mosque, also in al-Shati.
An Airwars investigation records that an Israeli airstrike at approximately 11:10 a.m. on 9 October destroyed the mosque, killing 10 to 11 civilians and injuring around 60. At least two children and several women, including a pregnant woman, were among the dead according to the sources it examined.
A joint appeal submitted by Palestinian human-rights organisations Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights to UN special procedures likewise recorded 11 civilians killed when Israeli aircraft struck Al-Sousi Mosque.
Other mosques reported struck during the opening weeks included Yarmouk Mosque, Abbas Mosque, Ishteiwi Mosque, Sheikh Shaaban Mosque, Shama’a Mosque, the Islamic University Mosque, Habib Muhammad Mosque in Khan Younis, Saad al-Ansari Mosque in Beit Lahia, Imam Ali Mosque in Jabalia, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Mosque in Nuseirat, Al-Omari Mosque in Jabalia, Anwar Aziz Mosque in Jabalia and Fatima al-Zahra Mosque in al-Zahra City.
These were not confined to Gaza City. From the first weeks the pattern stretched from Beit Lahia and Jabalia in the north, through Gaza City and the central camps, to Khan Younis and Rafah in the south.
Worshippers killed while gathered for prayer
One of the most disturbing characteristics of a number of attacks is their timing.
OHCHR has investigated the 15 November 2023 strike on Ihya al-Sunnah Mosque in the Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City. The mosque was crowded with men and boys gathering for evening prayer.
The UN human-rights office says at least 63 Palestinians were killed.
More unusually, investigators were able to assess the probable weapon. OHCHR concluded that the strike was highly likely carried out with a precision-guided MK-83-class munition. The Israeli military did not publicly announce a target or justification for that particular attack, according to the UN investigation.
That distinction is important.
In most attacks on Gaza’s mosques it is possible to establish that an airstrike, artillery round, tank shell or demolition destroyed the structure. It is not possible to responsibly name the exact bomb model. Photographs of ruins alone rarely establish whether the weapon was an MK-82, MK-83, MK-84, GBU-series guided bomb or another munition.
Where there is forensic evidence, however, the picture becomes clearer.
The most notorious example came at Al-Tabaeen School and its mosque/prayer hall in Gaza City’s al-Daraj district on 10 August 2024.
Thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering in the compound. The strike came during Fajr, the dawn prayer.
Gaza Civil Defence ultimately reported more than 90 dead; early Palestinian government statements placed the figure around 100. Reuters reported the Civil Emergency Service’s estimate of about 100 deaths, while CNN reported at least 93.
CNN’s weapons analysis identified debris from at least one US-manufactured GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb, a precision-guided weapon.
Israel acknowledged carrying out the attack. It said the prayer compound contained a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command-and-control facility and said militants were among those killed, while disputing the Palestinian casualty figure.
Palestinian officials and witnesses said the victims had assembled for dawn prayers.
Whatever the competing descriptions of those present, it remains one of the deadliest documented attacks on a place being used for Muslim worship during the war.
Deir al-Balah: Another mosque filled with displaced families
The Shuhada al-Aqsa Mosque beside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah became another refuge for Palestinians who had already lost their homes.
Shortly after midnight on 6 October 2024, Israeli aircraft struck it.
Safa reported 21 people killed in the mosque alone, with dozens wounded. In the combined attacks on the mosque and nearby Ibn Rushd School, Palestinian officials initially reported 24 deaths and 93 injuries; subsequent international reports put the combined toll at least at 26.
Israel confirmed attacking the Shuhada al-Aqsa Mosque structure, saying Hamas personnel were operating from a command centre embedded there. The military said it used “precise munitions”, surveillance and intelligence intended to reduce civilian casualties. It did not publicly identify the specific bomb model.
This is an important example of the central dispute surrounding many mosque attacks.
Israel says mosques lose their protection from direct attack when Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad uses them for military purposes. Palestinians argue that Israel has repeatedly invoked this explanation without publicly presenting evidence sufficient for independent scrutiny, particularly where displaced civilians were known to be sheltering in the same buildings.
Rafah’s Al-Farouq Mosque
Southern Gaza was no sanctuary either.
On 22 February 2024, an Israeli airstrike flattened the Al-Farouq Mosque in Rafah’s Shaboura area. Photographs showed little more than slabs of broken concrete where the mosque had stood.
Reuters reported at least seven bodies brought out following that night’s attacks on the mosque and neighbouring houses. WAFA likewise reported seven Palestinians killed in the Rafah bombardment, although available reporting does not establish that every one of the seven was actually inside the mosque.
The distinction matters: In a densely built city, a bomb dropped on a mosque may kill people in the mosque, in adjacent houses or in the street. Casualty totals should therefore not automatically be assigned to the mosque itself unless eyewitness or medical documentation establishes the location.
Great Omari Mosque: Destroying layers of history
Human loss is only one dimension of what happened.
At the heart of Gaza City’s old al-Daraj quarter stood the Great Omari Mosque, Gaza’s most important historic mosque and one of the oldest religious structures in Palestine.
Its architecture was itself a history book.
The site carried layers associated with antiquity, Byzantine Christianity, the Crusader period and Islamic Gaza. Parts of the structure incorporated a Crusader basilica. Mamluk and Ottoman rulers enlarged and embellished it. Its façade preserved a Gothic-style entrance arch, while its courtyard, marble mihrab, sandstone masonry and distinctive minaret spoke to later Islamic architectural traditions. UNESCO describes it as an architectural fusion and one of the principal monuments demonstrating Gaza’s continuous sacred history.
The complex covered approximately 4,100 square metres and was built largely of local kurkar sandstone. Historical inscriptions recorded Mamluk rulers, while the mosque’s library held old books and manuscripts.
It was struck more than once.
ICOMOS Palestine documented damage to its minaret in November 2023 and a devastating second Israeli airstrike around 7 December 2023, which destroyed most of the main structure.
Photographs afterwards showed the minaret rising almost alone from mountains of stone.
The precise bomb used in the December attack has not been independently established. It should therefore be described simply as an Israeli airstrike, rather than assigning it a particular bomb type without forensic evidence.
The loss is greater than that of one mosque. UNESCO’s description of Gaza’s historic centre stresses that the Omari represented the city’s successive Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman layers — material evidence that Gaza was never an ahistorical refugee enclave but a Mediterranean city with centuries of urban continuity.
Ibn Uthman: A Mamluk masterpiece disappears
Another extraordinary loss occurred in Shuja’iyya.
The Ibn Uthman Mosque, built in stages between the late 14th and early 15th centuries, was one of Gaza’s finest surviving examples of Burji Mamluk architecture.
Its courtyard, porticoes, domed mihrab and decorative stonework made it, after the Great Omari Mosque, one of the most celebrated historic mosques in Gaza. Inscriptions preserved the names of Mamluk patrons and even a 15th-century decree concerning taxation in Gaza.
An Israeli airstrike destroyed the mosque during fighting in Shuja’iyya in July 2024. UNESCO has since independently listed Ibn Uthman among Gaza’s damaged cultural properties.
A structure surviving approximately six centuries had disappeared in seconds.
Sayed Hashem and Gaza’s sacred geography
The Sayed Hashem Mosque was another landmark damaged in the opening months of the offensive.
Situated in Gaza City’s old quarter, it is traditionally associated with Hashem ibn Abd Manaf, the great-grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), who according to local tradition died in Gaza while travelling through the region.
ICOMOS Palestine reported the mosque damaged by Israeli fire during the war and identified it among the city’s important historic religious losses.
Its importance to Gazans therefore extended beyond architecture. The shrine helped give Gaza one of its traditional names, Ghazat Hashem — “Gaza of Hashem.”
Destroying or severely damaging such a building consequently affects not only contemporary worship but a place-name, a historical narrative and a community’s relationship with its city.
A mosque dating from 1951 becomes the latest casualty
The destruction has continued well beyond the first two years of the war.
On 24 August 2026, Israeli aircraft destroyed Abu Salim Mosque in Deir al-Balah, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Awqaf and the Palestine Information Center.
Built in 1951 by Hajj Muhammad Abu Salim, it was among the early mosques of modern Deir al-Balah and had become a centre for Quran classes and community and religious activities. The attack also destroyed the prayer hall of Asqalan Mosque in al-Shati camp, while the Al-Radwan Mosque prayer hall in western Gaza City sustained damage.
The exact munition used against Abu Salim Mosque has not been publicly verified.
Its destruction is significant precisely because it was not an imperial monument or medieval masterpiece. Heritage is also accumulated living memory: Weddings, funerals, Ramadan nights, children’s lessons and the voices of successive imams.
The imams and preachers who died
The destruction also followed Gaza’s religious personnel.
Gaza’s Ministry of Awqaf said early in 2024 that more than 100 scholars, preachers, imams, muezzins and Quran teachers had already been killed.
By 2026 the number was considerably higher.
Figures published by the Palestine Information Center in August 2026 said that by the end of 2025, 233 Muslim imams, preachers and religious educators and 20 Christian clergy had been killed. Other ministry figures published in February 2026 spoke of more than 330 ministry employees, religious scholars and imams killed across the broader religious establishment.
Among prominent religious figures killed was Sheikh Yusuf Salama, a former Palestinian minister of religious affairs and former preacher at Al-Aqsa Mosque, killed when his home in Maghazi refugee camp was bombed. The preacher and imam Wael al-Zard died of wounds after an attack on his home, while Walid Oweidah, who headed a Quran memorisation department in the Ministry of Awqaf, was also killed in an attack on his home in Gaza City’s Sabra district.
These cases must be distinguished from people killed inside mosques. The available evidence shows many religious personnel were killed in homes or elsewhere, rather than during the actual destruction of their mosque.
What bombs were used?
There is no credible evidence that a single type of bomb explains the destruction of Gaza’s mosques.
The documented methods include air-delivered precision-guided bombs and missiles, artillery fire, tank fire, bulldozing and controlled demolitions using explosives placed directly inside structures.
In several cases the exact weapon can be identified. OHCHR assessed the November 2023 Ihya al-Sunnah Mosque attack as highly likely involving a precision-guided MK-83 munition. CNN identified the remains of a US-made GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb at the Al-Tabaeen mosque/prayer-hall strike according to a United Nations report.
Amnesty International found another category of destruction entirely: Buildings blown up after Israeli troops had gained control of them.
Its investigation verified 43 videos depicting attacks on 34 mosques and documented at least 12 mosques destroyed in controlled demolitions. Amnesty specifically examined the Al-Dhilal Mosque in Bani Suheila and Al-Istiqlal Mosque in Khan Younis, concluding that manually placed explosives were used while Israeli forces controlled the locations.
That evidence matters because a controlled demolition is fundamentally different from a split-second airstrike during active combat. The question of immediate military necessity becomes harder to answer when troops already control a building and have the ability to search, secure or isolate it.
Did Israel have a military purpose?
Israel says unequivocally that it did.
The Israeli military has published a series of statements alleging Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used mosques as weapons-storage facilities, meeting points, tunnel entrances and command centres. It says intelligence and material captured in Gaza demonstrated military use of “dozens of mosques.”
For individual attacks including Al-Tabaeen, Shuhada al-Aqsa and Al-Farouq, Israel has stated that militants or command structures were operating in or from the buildings.
International humanitarian law does not make a mosque immune under every conceivable circumstance. A place of worship being genuinely used for military action can lose its normal protection for the duration of that use. Even then, the attacking force remains bound by the principles of distinction, proportionality and precautions to protect civilians.
The harder question is whether a military explanation plausibly accounts for destruction on the scale documented in Gaza.
Here the evidence becomes much more troubling.
Amnesty International examined controlled demolitions in which Israeli troops appeared to be in physical control of religious and cultural properties and concluded in several cases that there was no evident imperative military necessity for destroying them. The organisation said the evidence suggested destruction itself may in some cases have been the objective.
OHCHR has reached similarly serious conclusions concerning the pattern rather than every individual strike. Its 2026 overview highlighted attacks during prayer times and reported that 17 mosques were struck during April 2024, including eight around Eid al-Fitr on 11 and 12 April. It said Israel had not presented evidence substantiating the loss of civilian protection for those places and concluded that the timing, weapons and pattern raised concerns that places of worship were either directly targeted or attacked without adequate precautions.
Those findings do not prove that every demolished mosque was intentionally attacked because it was a mosque. Nor do they establish that no mosque was ever militarily used.
They do, however, make it difficult to explain the destruction of virtually an entire religious landscape simply as incidental collateral damage.
More than buildings
International recognition of the cultural dimension has expanded as the ruins have accumulated.
A UN report noted the destruction or damage of the 800-year-old Sheikh Zakaria Mosque, the Great Omari Mosque and other important religious sites. UNESCO has independently confirmed damage to the Great Omari and Ibn Uthman mosques among the cultural properties it has monitored.
The Great Omari is now included within Gaza’s historic centre on Palestine’s UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, which emphasises the survival in one urban landscape of Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman architectural layers.
This is what statistics such as 1,077 completely destroyed mosques cannot convey.
A mosque is concrete and stone, but it is also sound: The dawn call to prayer; children’s voices reciting after school; a Friday congregation spilling onto the pavement; Ramadan evenings; neighbours meeting one another five times a day.
Destroy enough of them and something less visible is damaged — the system through which a community remembers itself.
That may explain why Gazans have begun erecting prayer spaces in tents and beneath sheets of plastic almost as quickly as the permanent structures disappear. By August 2026 Gaza’s Ministry of Awqaf said 428 temporary prayer spaces were operating across the Strip.
The minarets may have fallen, but the congregations have not disappeared.
And that leaves a question that any eventual investigation of the Gaza war will have to confront mosque by mosque, strike by strike:
What military necessity required each of these buildings to be destroyed — and where no such necessity can be demonstrated, was Gaza losing not merely a battlefield structure, but part of its religious history and collective memory?
The question becomes more urgent, not less, when the destroyed building is a 600-year-old Mamluk mosque, a packed prayer hall at dawn or a neighbourhood mosque built in 1951.
For Gaza, reconstruction will therefore involve more than replacing bricks.
It will mean reconstructing a landscape of worship, memory and history that, according to its own Ministry of Awqaf, has been almost entirely erased from the physical map of the Strip.
In Gaza, even the cemeteries are no longer reserved for the dead.
CROSSFIREARABIA – In Gaza, even the cemeteries are no longer reserved for the dead.
Between headstones and freshly turned earth, Palestinian families have stretched sheets, driven wooden poles into the ground and erected makeshift tents. Children carry water through rows of graves. Mothers cook whatever food they can find beside burial plots. Washing hangs between tombstones. At night, families retreat behind thin pieces of cloth, surrounded by graves because, after repeated displacement, they say there is simply nowhere else to go.
The extraordinary sight is now part of Gaza’s displacement crisis: Living families making temporary homes in places built for the dead.
In Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah and elsewhere in the Gaza Strip, cemeteries and their surroundings have become last-resort shelters for Palestinians whose homes were destroyed or who were ordered to leave areas where they had already sought refuge.
The Palestine Information Center documented the Abu Samak family sleeping on the ground between graves in Al-Sawarha cemetery in Al-Zawayda, central Gaza, after they were forced from their home east of Deir al-Balah. The family said areas to which displaced people had been directed were already packed, leaving them with few choices. Father Adham Abu Samak summed up the family’s predicament with a question heard repeatedly across Gaza: Where are we supposed to go?
Another displaced woman, Ibtisam Abu Amra, told the Palestine Information Center that her family fled from Abu Arif east of Deir al-Balah and eventually ended up in a cemetery in the centre of the city. She described displacement as taking the children, elderly relatives and whatever possessions could be carried and heading towards an unknown destination. When every alternative was exhausted, she said, the cemetery was what remained.
Ten Children Living Among the Graves
One of the clearest recent examples comes from the Al-Namsawi area of Khan Younis.
In July 2026, Al Jazeera documented the family of Mazen Younis, who, with his wife and children, had been living inside a cemetery in the Mawasi area of Khan Younis for around a year and a half.
The family had originally lived in the Al-Manara neighbourhood before successive displacement forced them elsewhere. Eventually they reached the cemetery.
Their “home” consisted largely of fabric screens erected between graves.
There was no normal kitchen, reliable water supply or the basic infrastructure associated with a house. Younis, who suffers from heart disease, relied on his young daughters to bring water to the family, even when the available water was not suitable for drinking.
Instead of attending school, the girls spent part of their day fetching water and walking to a takiyya, or community food kitchen, to collect meals.
Even that food, the family said, was insufficient.
Younis’s wife said there was no cooking gas or many of the other necessities normally found in a household. The children travelled daily for food and water while the family endured the heat, insects and the psychological strain of living surrounded by graves. The report also described rodents and scorpions as part of the family’s surroundings.
It is an existence reduced to its most basic components: Something overhead for shade, something beneath the body for sleeping, a container in which to carry water, and, when available, a pot in which to heat or cook food.
A Tent Becomes the Entire House
Reporting by the Gaza-based Safa News Agency provides another window into what happens when a family’s entire domestic life is compressed into a tent.
Displaced Palestinian Mardai Shahada described the tent as simultaneously the family’s house, bedroom and kitchen — their whole existence confined to cloth and plastic incapable of properly protecting them from the summer heat or winter cold. , Safa, the Palestine Press Agency has documented families patching worn tents with nylon and thread simply to keep some protection between themselves and the weather.
Other Safa reporting describes displaced people sitting beside plastic tents, storing water in buckets and improvising shelters from whatever materials they can obtain. During extreme heat, tents can become almost impossible to remain inside during daytime, while insects and even snakes have been reported around sleeping areas.
Winter presents the opposite problem.
Gaza’s Civil Defence told Safa that 1,542 tents were flooded by rain in just two days around the beginning of January 2025, with water rising above 30 centimetres in some locations. Bedding and personal belongings were soaked and some displaced people suffered severe shivering from the cold.
For families living in cemeteries, these same problems are compounded by the environment around them. There are few proper drainage systems, bathrooms or established water points designed for hundreds of people to live there.
Cooking Beside Graves
Life continues because it has to.
Families collect drinking and washing water in plastic jerrycans and buckets. Food comes from humanitarian assistance when available, community kitchens, relatives or whatever can be purchased at increasingly difficult prices.
Cooking is often improvised.
With kitchens destroyed and fuel scarce, displaced families across Gaza have relied on small fires and makeshift cooking arrangements beside their tents. Safa described families in displacement camps gathering around fires at night during cold weather.
Inside the cemeteries, domestic objects consequently appear in surroundings where they would once have seemed unimaginable: Cooking pots, plastic bowls, mattresses, blankets, clotheslines, water containers and children’s belongings sitting beside gravestones.
A cemetery ceases to function exclusively as a burial ground. It becomes a neighbourhood — but one without the services of a neighbourhood.
Toilets Are Another Problem
Sanitation is among the least visible but most serious difficulties.
There are generally no household bathrooms for families who pitch tents inside or beside burial grounds. Displaced people depend on whatever communal facilities exist nearby, improvised latrines or rudimentary pits.
The shortage of proper sanitation can create another danger.
In July 2026, Al Jazeera reported that a displaced Gaza resident trying to enlarge an absorption pit for wastewater beside his tent in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood unexpectedly uncovered the body of a child who had previously been buried there when the area was being used as an improvised wartime burial site.
The incident illustrates the extraordinary overlap that has developed between displacement and burial in Gaza: People are sometimes living on land where emergency graves were dug during earlier stages of the war.
Cemeteries Within Cemeteries
The crisis is made more complicated because Gaza’s burial system itself has been transformed.
Sanad News Agency, citing the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, reported in September 2024 that around 29 major improvised mass burial locations containing more than 3,000 bodies had been identified, while more than 120 smaller improvised mass graves containing three or more people had been created across Gaza since October 2023.
Sanad has subsequently reported efforts to remove bodies from some of these temporary wartime burial grounds and rebury them in established cemeteries. In December 2025, for example, Gaza Civil Defence said 94 bodies were removed from an improvised cemetery in Sahaba Street in Gaza City as part of a wider effort that had involved moving the remains of thousands of people previously buried in emergency locations.
The result is a landscape in which the distinction between residential space, displacement camp and burial ground has repeatedly been erased.
Hundreds of Families Around One Khan Younis Cemetery
There is no reliable, comprehensive figure for how many Palestinians are currently living inside cemeteries across the entire Gaza Strip. Numbers vary according to location and repeated displacement, and families may enter or leave a site after evacuation orders, attacks or changes in military control.
It would therefore be misleading to put forward one precise Gaza-wide number.
What can be documented, however, is that the phenomenon extends well beyond a handful of isolated families.
The Palestine Information Center reported that an area around the Turkish cemetery west of Khan Younis contained hundreds of displaced Palestinian families. During an Israeli military incursion in July 2025, many fled again, leaving behind fragile tents and small quantities of food and possessions. The same report described torn tents, scattered belongings and burned food after the troops withdrew according to the Palestine Information Center.
Al Jazeera reported in July 2026 that hundreds of displaced families had erected tents in and around cemetery areas in Khan Younis, while its correspondent referred more broadly to thousands of families being driven towards cemetery areas during successive waves of displacement.
The distinction is important: Hundreds of families have been specifically documented at individual cemetery locations, but there is no authoritative census establishing the total number of people sleeping in cemeteries throughout Gaza.
Even the Cemeteries Are Not Safe
Seeking shelter among graves does not guarantee protection.
In July 2025, the Palestine Information Center reported an Israeli ground incursion around the Turkish cemetery, slaughterhouse area and outskirts of Mawasi in Khan Younis. Tanks, artillery and bulldozers entered an area where hundreds of displaced families had been sheltering, forcing people to flee once again. Residents later returned to find tents destroyed and possessions scattered.
The same report cited Gaza’s Ministry of Religious Endowments as saying around 40 cemeteries had at that stage been completely or partly damaged during the war. More recent reporting by the Palestine Information Center, citing Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, said in March 2026 that its analysis of 62 official cemeteries found 39 completely destroyed and another 19 partially damaged, leaving only four without documented damage — figures attributed to the rights organisation.
That makes the choice of a cemetery as shelter particularly bleak.
Families do not move there because they believe a graveyard is comfortable or safe. They move there because a cemetery may contain one of the few remaining pieces of ground on which nobody is demanding rent and where a tent can still be squeezed between other displaced families.
Living Beside Death
For adults, living among graves carries its own psychological burden.
For children it can be worse.
They play where bodies are buried. They walk between graves to fetch drinking water. After sunset, darkness, stray dogs, insects and the presence of the dead can turn the surroundings frightening.
Yet by morning the ordinary routines begin again.
Someone searches for water.
Someone goes to the community kitchen.
A mother washes clothes or dishes with the small amount of water available.
A fire is lit.
Children emerge from tents.
Blankets and mattresses are rearranged.
And families who once lived in houses try to reproduce the smallest elements of home in a place never intended for the living.
Gaza’s cemetery dwellers are therefore not simply another image of displacement. They represent something more disturbing: The exhaustion of alternatives.
When homes disappear, schools become shelters, shelters are overcrowded or attacked, rent is unaffordable and every supposedly safer area fills with tents, eventually even land belonging to the dead becomes valuable living space.
For some Palestinians in Gaza, the question is no longer whether anyone should have to live in a cemetery.
It is much simpler.
Where else can they go?
The above feature article is written with the help of AI based on specific information fed about Gazans being forced to seek shelter in cemetries. It’s posted on crossfirearabia.com with full links and references.
Amid ongoing deadly hostilities in Gaza, the enclave’s farmers face the increasingly difficult challenge of finding safe land to grow their crops.
Satellite images published last Tuesday in news analysis from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UNOSAT, the UN Satellite Centre, indicate that just three per cent (448 hectares) of the shattered enclave’s farmland remains usable.
In October 2025, only 601 hectares were accessible and undamaged.
“This latest assessment paints a stark picture of the continued deterioration of Gaza’s agriculture sector,” said Rein Paulsen, Director of FAO’s Office of Emergencies and Resilience. “Without urgent action to restore safe access and provide farmers with the support they need, opportunities to restore local food production will continue to diminish.”
Bombed out
For cucumber and tomato grower Taysir Dahdouh, the war between Hamas fighters and Israel sparked by Hamas’s deadly attacks in October 2023 has been marked by overwhelming loss.
“I had a good income before the war,” he said. “Suddenly, we were left with nothing…Even the steel frames of the greenhouses disappeared, along with our homes, belongings, and irrigation pipes. Nothing was left.”
After returning from displacement, Mr. Dahdouh tried to restore the land using basic tools, working with his family. “We managed to rehabilitate about one dunum (about one-tenth of a hectare) of our land to bring it back to life,” he explained.
Another Gaza farmer, Wajiha Dahdouh, highlighted other equally serious problems: “We came back to support ourselves and return to farming so we could survive. Unfortunately, there is not enough water, there are no fertilizers, no seeds, and none of the basic necessities that would allow people to continue their lives.”
Squeezed out
The reduced growing space for Gaza’s farmers today is mainly the result of a lack of access, rather than additional damage from the war, which was already massive.
In June 2026, just over 4,000 hectares of cropland in Gaza – or 27 per cent – could be reached, but approximately 3,600 hectares of this was unfit for planting.
Farmers in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis have seen the largest reductions in available land, FAO said.
This is primarily because of the “westward expansion” of the so-called ‘Yellow Line’ that separates the ceasefire zone from the Israel Defense Forces’ military-controlled area.
Rafah in the far south of Gaza has the highest levels of inaccessible cropland and greenhouse growing areas, at 97.2 per cent and 98.4 per cent respectively.
“The most extensive physical damage remains concentrated in North Gaza and Gaza governorates,” the agency noted. Most damage is in North Gaza and Gaza, satellite images show.
Lucica Matei UN News infographic
The situation for Gazans remains dire. Just this weekend, UN partners reported multiple air strikes and incidents of shelling, gunfire and naval fire, primarily west of the Yellow Line, where most of Gaza’s 2.1 million people are now confined to an area less than half the size of the enclave. UN News
In Gaza, tents are no longer havens from war. They have become prisons of fabric, trapping displaced civilians in the sweltering heat of the summer, while thirst, hunger, mosquitoes, and disease stalk them at every turn.
Here, people don’t escape the constant bombing to safety. Rather day, they face another battle against the scorching sun, the scarce water, and the sleepless nights in tattered tents, that no longer protect from the darkness.
“There are eight of us living in a tent, and the situation is hell in the summer,” displaced woman Mariam Baraka, tells the Sanad News Agency, whilst summarizing the details of life inside her tent that offers no protection from the heat and leaves little to dignity.
She says she spends long hours searching for water under the bitter hit of the sun, sometimes managing to fill a few buckets, while other times she returns empty-handed after a grueling journey to a distant water source.
The suffering doesn’t end with thirst. The family is forced to cook over a wood fire amidst sweltering temperatures, and cardboard boxes serve as a primitive makeshift tolls to circulating air inside the tent.
Maryam recounts that her son can no longer bear the intense heat, constantly telling her: “Mommy, I can’t take it anymore.” Her young child is unable to sleep due to the heat and the bites from mosquitoes and flies that have covered his body in blisters. Their entire lives revolve around the sun and what she describes as “extremely difficult” conditions.
Maryam’s testimony reflects the stark reality faced by nearly one million displaced people—about 170,000 families—who endure the summer heat in tents and makeshift shelters, according to a recent report by the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Documented data indicates that 125,000 out of 135,000 tents have been damaged and are unfit for human use due to weather conditions. The organization also reports that approximately 5,000 families are sleeping in the open without any shelter from the sun or darkness.
A Daily Battle
The tents, made of nylon and thick fabric, have become like closed ovens, with temperatures inside sometimes exceeding 37 to 40 degrees Celsius. This makes staying inside nearly impossible due to the trapped heat and humidity, a situation described in international press reports as “slow death inside thermal gas chambers.”
The tragedy is compounded by the severe water crisis. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) confirms that water supplies in the camps have dropped to critical levels, forcing families, including children, to walk long distances under the scorching sun to obtain limited quantities of water.
The dangers don’t stop at heat and thirst. The spread of mosquitoes and flies within the camps has led to skin diseases among children, while displacement areas are witnessing an increase in snakes, scorpions, and rats due to the accumulation of rubble and the breakdown of sanitation systems, according to multiple media reports.
Doctors and health workers warn of a rise in skin and infectious diseases, in addition to heatstroke and dehydration, which threaten the lives of children and the elderly.
The Secretary-General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, emphasized that this humanitarian catastrophe could have been avoided were it not for the continued blockade and the closure of crossings, which prevent the entry of essential aid, awning materials, wood, and hygiene supplies.
With the destruction of homes and infrastructure, areas like the Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah camps have been transformed into vast tent cities lacking water and sanitation. Each tent has become a new chapter in an unending ordeal, a daily battleground for displaced people struggling for survival.
Heba
CrossFireArabia
