Writing on the wall: Cemetery full

Gaza City: "We couldn't find anywhere to bury my cousin," Mahmoud Al Zinati said on Tuesday, as he sat on the edge of a tomb in Gaza.

"So we've opened the grave of another cousin who was martyred two years ago to bury this one."

"I can't describe my feelings. No one can feel what I am going through," the 23-year-old said as he broke off his digging at the Shaikh Redwan cemetery. "No one can feel how sad I am."

His 16-year-old cousin, killed in an air strike, he says, will rest above another cousin, also killed in violence in the Palestinian enclave two years ago, at the age of 12. In 18 days of war, more than 940 Gazans have died, many of them civilians.

The big Shaikh Redwan graveyard, like others in the city of Gaza, is packed with white stone tombstones and a sign on the wall outside tells families in plain terms: "Cemetery Full".

That is a common problem in Gaza, where the population has trebled in little over a generation. But the instructions to use another site a short distance from the city pose a major problem on this sunny winter's morning - the new cemetery lies on the far side of the Israeli tank battalions ringing the city.

"We went round the city cemeteries but we couldn't find a place to bury my cousin," Al Zinati said. "Can you believe this?"

Emergency

Relatives have had to resort to digging graves themselves since the cemetery has no gravediggers - because it is supposed to be full - and they are breaking with Muslim tradition, which dictates against shared tombs, except in times of emergency.

Across the graveyard, another young man, Basil Khair Al Deen, is burying a friend - in a stranger's grave. He was unable to find space close to a member of the dead man's family.

"We are burying them together and may God accept them," he said.

On the violence front, Israeli troops and Hamas fighters traded fierce gunfire on the streets of Gaza City yesterday as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas accused the Jewish state of trying to "wipe out" his people.

Israeli special forces backed by tanks and air strikes lunged ever deeper into the largest city in Gaza, advancing several hundred metres into several neighbourhoods in the south, witnesses and correspondents said.

The thuds of tanks shells and the rattle of gunfire kept terrified residents awake overnight, although many had fled the area. Witnesses said the fighting was the most intense of the 18-day-old conflict.

War of extermination

As Egypt pressed on with an initiative designed to bring about an immediate end to Israel's deadliest ever attack on the impoverished strip, Abbas said Israel appeared intent on waging a war of extermination.

Reaction: No foreign fighters

Hamas politiburo member Mohammad Nazal denied reports of a Saudi fighter being killed in the fighting alongside Hamas in Gaza. "There is no truth in the report," Nazal told Gulf News. "Such reports are part of a propaganda by Israel and some Palestinian sources to show that the fighting in Gaza is not a Palestinian fighting, and that it is between Islamists and Israel," he added. Press reports quoted several Islamic websites as saying Abu Mohammad Al Merri, who reportedly arrived in Gaza 10 days ago , "has become a martyr in the land of Gaza." They didn't give a date of his death or the way in which he managed to enter Gaza.

- Jumana Al Tamimi, Associate Editor