'My children cling to me as dogs raid graves near our shelter'
By Fergal Keane
The children hear the dogs snarling outside, just beyond the flimsy plastic of the tent.
The seven children of Rehab Abu Daqqa crowd around their mother. She is the last safe harbour in their lives. They have shared things, these children and their mother, which cannot be communicated to those who have not seen the things they have seen. Is there a word to express what a child feels knowing that just a few yards away, animals are dragging a body from a grave?
The vocabulary of childhood is inadequate amid the horrors of this emergency cemetery in Rafah.
Scared is the word Rehab Abu Daqqa uses.
WARNING: This report contains descriptions some readers may find disturbing
That is accurate. But there is more to it, she knows. The children have seen dogs eating the bodies. A human leg lying by a fence. So yes they are scared. But revolted too, and uncomprehending. The children who once had a home, went to school, lived according to the established rhythms of their family and community, are now refugees in a place that reeks of death.
“This morning the dogs took out a body from one of the graves and were eating it,” Rehab Abu Daqqa says. “From night until dawn the dogs do not let us sleep… our children keep holding on to me because of how scared they are.”
The dogs come in packs of dozens. Domestic pets whose owners are dead or displaced, mixed with Rafah’s existing population of strays, all of them now feral and scavenging for whatever they can eat. The cemetery has numerous shallow graves where people place their dead until a time comes when they can be taken to their home area. On some graves relatives have placed bricks to try to keep the dogs away from the dead.
