No resting in peace for Gaza dead

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) - Stench, debris and human remains greeted Palestinians in the city of Gaza on Wednesday after an Israeli missile strike at dawn -- but in this case no one died.

A big explosion tore through the increasingly packed Sheikh Redwan cemetery, shattering tombstones and ripping bones and recently buried flesh from the earth.

"The planes have struck even the dead. There is nothing the planes have not hit in the Gaza Strip," lamented Abu Fayez al-Shurafa, leaning on a cane.

He moved around the graveyard with others who live nearby, gathering remains, righting fallen grave markers, wincing at the smell. "I was shocked they would dare do this. The flesh of the dead flew in them streets and we are collecting them in bags."

An Israeli army spokesman said the air strike had not aimed at the cemetery itself but at what he described as an arms dump and rocket-launching site on the edge of it. He said "secondary explosions" from stored weaponry had caused the main damage.

Gazans were unimpressed, complaining that the bombing offended religious sensibilities common to Muslims and Jews. Leading cleric Abdel-Karim al-Kahlout, the city's grand mufti, said: "Jews would rise up if anyone so much as broke a tombstone in their cemeteries. Attacking the dead is forbidden in every religion and in every belief."

People in Gaza have already been resorting to reopening old tombs in the Sheikh Redwan cemetery to bury some of the 1,000 or more killed since Israel launched an offensive on December 27 it said was meant to end Hamas rocket strikes on its towns.

Above the wall, a sign prominently displays the message "Cemetery Full" and exhorts people to take their dead to a new site out of town. The problem is, that site is now on the far side of the Israeli lines around the city. So families had been coming back to Sheikh Redwan for fresh burials this month.

Mufti Kahlout said most of the remains recovered on Wednesday would be re-interred in a single, mass grave.