The Ghosts are not Silent

The Indian cemetery in Gaza and the Indian government's silence on the genocide

- Vijay Prashad

In late 2014, I was taken to see the Gaza War Cemetery in al-Tuffah (The Apple) by my new friends Yasser Murtaja and Roshdi Sarraj of Ain Media.

They wanted to show me the Indian graves in this old British cemetery. We met the caretaker there, Essam Jaradah, who took us to see the Indian section. Soldiers from across the British Empire had been brought here to fight the Ottoman troops during the First World War. I had not expected to see these graves in Gaza. I knew that Indian soldiers had fought in Basra (Iraq) because some distant relatives of mine had been part of the misnamed British Expeditionary Force. The British named their armies in such a way that one could assume that the soldiers were from some small towns in England, but they were not. They were largely from India and Egypt. The 7th Meerut Division and the 3rd Lahore Division made up the troops, while the Indian Labour Corps and the Camel Transport Corps formed the logistical backbone of the British forces in Gaza. The dead in the cemetery came from them, and it was their names that I traced on the stones, and it was these soldiers who made up the dead in the unmarked graves.