New Bureij cemetery in Al-Bureij, a Palestinian refugee camp in central Gaza.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Israel has said that 253 people were taken hostage during the Hamas terror attacks on October 7 and believes 132 hostages are still in Gaza \u2013 105 of them alive and 27 dead. <\/p>\n
Munther al Hayek\u2019s daughter Dina was killed in the 2014 Gaza war. In early January he visited Dina\u2019s grave at Sheikh Radwan cemetery in Gaza City, but she wasn\u2019t there. He tried to find his grandmother\u2019s grave. It wasn\u2019t there either. <\/p>\n
Mosab Abu Toha, a poet from Gaza whose work has been published in the New York Times and the New Yorker, also learned that the cemetery where his younger brother and grandfather are buried was heavily damaged by the Israeli military. <\/p>\n
The occupation forces destroyed and bulldozed them\u2026 The scenes are horrific. We want the world to intervene to protect Palestinian civilians.\u201d <\/p>\n
Munther al Hayek, whose daughter\u2019s grave was destroyed <\/p>\n
The death toll in Gaza is growing by the day. More than 24,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks, according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza. Burials often happen quickly in accordance with Islamic practice, and, since the war began, the dead have often been buried in mass graves. <\/p>\n
International law experts say the desecration of burial grounds contravenes the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that established and governs the International Criminal Court (ICC) to adjudicate war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression. Israel, which originally supported the creation of the court, did not ratify the Rome Statute. <\/p>\n
Cemeteries are given protections as \u201ccivilian objects\u201d under international law and are afforded special protections, with limited exceptions. <\/p>\n
Cemeteries can only be attacked or destroyed if the other warring party uses them for military purposes, or if doing so is deemed a military necessity, with the military advantage gained outweighing the damage to civilian objects. <\/p>\n
South Africa raised the IDF\u2019s destruction of graveyards in Gaza as part of its case at the International Court of Justice arguing Israel is committing genocide. Israel denies the allegation, but Dill said that while the destruction of cemeteries alone does not amount to genocide, it can add to evidence of Israel\u2019s intent. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s huge symbolic meaning to the notion that not even the dead are left in peace,\u201d Dill said. \u201cInternational humanitarian law protects the dignity of people who are outside of combat or the combat, and that protection doesn\u2019t end when they die.\u201d <\/p>\n
But, in at least two cases, it is clear pains have been taken to respect the dead \u2013 at cemeteries where Palestinians aren\u2019t buried. <\/p>\n
Just a half mile away from the destroyed Al-Tuffah cemetery, east of Gaza City, a cemetery holding the bodies of mostly British and Australian soldiers who died in World War I and II stands largely intact. A crater on the burial grounds appears in satellite imagery between October 8 and October 15, but it has otherwise been untouched by the war. <\/p>\n
A second cemetery administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in central Gaza offers an even starker example. Mangled vehicles and destroyed roads lay all around the cemetery. But the graveyard itself, which contains the graves of mostly Christians and some Jewish soldiers from World War I, is intact. <\/p>\n
What is happening is a clear violation of these basic rules and considered a war crime of \u2018committing outrages upon personal dignity\u2019 under the Rome Statute.\u201d <\/p>\n
Muna Haddad, a human rights lawyer <\/p>\n
Israeli soldiers even posed with an Israeli flag by the grave of a Jewish soldier buried there and another image posted to social media shows a tank sitting on the edge of the graveyard \u2013 respecting the sanctity of that hallowed ground. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is happening is a clear violation of these basic rules and considered a war crime of \u2018committing outrages upon personal dignity\u2019 under the Rome Statute,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The IDF said rescuing the hostages and finding and returning their bodies is one of its key missions in Gaza, which is why bodies were removed from some gravesites. In the Shajaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, Israeli military vehicles could be seen where the cemetery once stood, with berms surrounding them on all sides. The <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":14379,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14378","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}