Dignified burials have become another casualty in Gaza.

For four days, Kareem Sabawi’s body lay wrapped in a blanket in a cold, empty apartment while his family sheltered nearby. He was killed during heavy Israeli bombing near his family home, his father and mother said, and in the days that followed it was too dangerous to go outside and let their 10-year-old child rest.

His family called the Palestinian Red Crescent for help. But it was the early days of Israel’s ground invasion of northern Gaza, and military forces blocked the streets with tanks and gunfire, preventing rescuers from reaching victims of Israeli airstrikes. Every day the father, Hazem Sabawi, suffered double torment: he mourned his son and could not grant him the final dignity of a proper burial.

“After the fourth day I said that was it. Either I get buried with him or I don’t bury him at all,” he said, recounting how he laid his son under a guava tree behind a neighbor’s apartment building.

“Every person has the right to be buried,” Mr Sabawi said.

It has been 13 weeks since Israel’s war in Gaza began following the attack on Israel by Hamas, which Israeli officials say killed around 1,200 people. Since then, the living in Gaza have been forced to bury their dead hastily and without ceremony or final rites, fearing they could risk the same fate as their loved ones.

More than 22,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Civilians are being killed at a rate that kills few precedents in this century. The conflict has turned Gaza into a “cemetery for thousands of children” said the United Nations.

“The situation has come to the point where we say: the lucky ones are those who have someone to bury them when they die,” said Dr. Mohammad Abu Moussa, a radiologist at Al-Nasr Hospital in southern Gaza.

Traditionally, Palestinians honor their dead with public funeral processions and mourning tents placed on the streets for three days to receive those who wish to express their condolences. But the war has made it impossible to maintain these traditions.

Instead, the dead have been buried in mass graves, hospital courtyards and backyards, often without headstones, their names scrawled on white grave cloths or body bags. Funeral prayers are said quickly – or not at all – in hospital hallways or outside morgues.

Ameera Harouda reporting contributed.