Description
On 20 January 2024, a CNN investigation revealed that the Israeli military has desecrated at least 16 cemeteries during its offensive in Gaza, bulldozing gravestones, churning up bodies and damaging memorials. Whilst the IDF claimed that Hamas used cemeteries for military activities and to conceal deceased hostages, critics have claimed that Israeli attacks on graveyards violate basic rules on protected sites and could be considered war crimes. Drawing on Jessica Auchter, Adriana Cavarero and Randa May Wahbe, this paper will examine a specific form of violence is that is no longer concerned with simply extinguishing human life but eradicating the dead. This paper will contend that attacks on cemeteries should not be dismissed as an incidental or collateral damage, but should be understood as a distinct form of genocidal violence that seeks to sever the relationship between the living and the dead. It will show how attacks on necropolises—on both the corpses located inside them and the monuments that commemorate them—seeks to expunge the connection between people and place. At the same time, the paper will examine how Palestinian attempts to mourn the dead—despite these attacks on memorials—can be understood as both a personal intervention to remember those who have died and a political intervention to reaffirm the connection between the living and the dead, and between people and place.
