Gazans lose tens of thousands in war, but have few chances to mourn

Once a day, Umm Omar picks up the phone and calls her late husband, humouring their four-year-old daughter who does not understand yet her father was killed early in the Gaza war.

Little Ella "wants us to call him, to tell him about her day", said Umm Omar, who has fled with her three children to Al Mawasi, a coastal area teeming with mostly displaced Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza since war between Israel and Palestinian militants broke out on October 7, the Hamas-run territory's health ministry said on Thursday.

It was triggered by Hamas's attack on southern Israel that day that resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Umm Omar told AFP she did not understand "how the months have gone by" since her husband, Ibrahim Al Shanbari, was killed in an Israeli strike on northern Gaza.

When he died, Umm Omar said she lost everything "in a fraction of a second", but there was little time to bury him properly, grieve or process the loss of the "kind" man that he was.

There was no funeral procession or "any of the usual mourning (rituals) because it's wartime", Umm Omar added.

"It was very difficult to say goodbye... because the martyrs were buried very quickly," she said, with fighting raging across the besieged territory.

To help Ella, "I ended up pretending" her father was still alive, said Umm Omar.

Still, according to her, others had it worse, "those who have lost an entire family, those who have not been able to say goodbye, or those who find their children in pieces".

With more than 1.5 per cent of Gaza's 2.4 million population killed during the war, many people have lost loved ones.

The smell of death is everywhere, but under constant bombardment, shelling and battles, Gazans often have little time — or place that is not in ruins — to process their grief.

Some victims bled to death before reaching hospitals, many of which had gone out of service due to the fighting or facing severe shortages amid an Israeli siege imposed early on in the war.

Others were crushed under their toppled homes, their bodies eventually retrieved from the rubble of bombed-out neighbourhoods. Some are still missing, feared buried under the ruins.

To Mustafa Al Khatib, 56, who has lost several relatives, "death has replaced life."

The incessant violence has rendered many cemeteries inaccessible, often forcing Gazans to dig makeshift graves with whatever tools they can find, Khatib told AFP.

And "there are no stones or cement to make a concrete covering for the grave either", he said.

The hasty interment of Khatib's uncle in a hospital yard has left him with a "heavy heart", he said.

His sister was laid to rest at a long abandoned cemetery, which Khatib said was later bombed.

In central Gaza's Al Maghazi refugee camp, a woman placed her hand on the ground outside a school used a displacement shelter: this is where she said her daughter was buried after dying in her arms, fatally wounded in a blast.

"I wonder if his body remained intact or if it was in pieces. I have no idea."