Families dig to retrieve bodies buried in Gaza rubble
DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA STRIP » The wreckage goes on for block after devastated block. The smell is sickening. Every day, hundreds of people claw through tons of rubble with shovels and iron bars and their bare hands.
They are looking for the bodies of their children. Their parents. Their neighbors. All of them killed in Israeli missile strikes. The corpses are there, somewhere in the seemingly endless acres of destruction.
More than five weeks into Israel’s war against Hamas, some streets are more like graveyards. Officials in Gaza say they don’t have the equipment, manpower or fuel to search properly for the living, let alone the dead.
Israel says its strikes target fighters and the infrastructure of Hamas, the militant group behind the deadly Oct. 7 attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel. Hamas often operates in residential areas, and Israel accuses it of using the civilian population as human shields, though it does not explain specific targeting reasons for most strikes.
The victims are often everyday Palestinians, many of whom have yet to be found.
Omar al-Darawi and his neighbors have spent weeks searching the ruins of a pair of four-story houses in central Gaza. Forty-five people lived in the homes; 32 were killed. In the first days after the attack, 27 bodies were recovered.
The five still missing were al-Darawi’s cousins.
They include Amani, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom whose husband and four children also died. There’s Aliaa, 28, who was taking care of her aging parents. There’s another Amani, who died with her 14-yearold daughter. Her husband and their five sons survived.
“The situation has become worse every day,” said the 23-year-old, who was once a college journalism student. The smell has become unbearable.
“We can’t stop,” he said. “We just want to find and bury them” before their bodies are lost in the rubble forever.
The toll and the searching
More than 11,400 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and minors, according to Palestinian health authorities. The U.N. humanitarian affairs office estimates that about 2,700 people, including 1,500 children, are missing and believed buried in the ruins.
The missing add layers of pain to Gaza’s families, who are overwhelmingly Muslim.
Islam calls for the dead to be buried quickly — within 24 hours if possible — with the shrouded bodies turned to face the holy city of Mecca.
Traditionally, the body is washed by family members with soap and scented water, and prayers for forgiveness are said at the gravesite.
The search is particularly difficult in northern Gaza, including Gaza City, where Israeli ground forces are battling Hamas militants.
Hundreds of thousands of people have fled southward, terrified by the combat and pushed by Israeli warnings to evacuate.
In the south, continued Israeli airstrikes and shelling mean nowhere is safe in the tiny territory.
No heavy equipment
The Palestinian Civil Defense department, Gaza’s primary search-and-rescue
force, has had more than two dozen workers killed and over 100 injured since the war began, said spokesman Mahmoud Bassal.
More than half its vehicles are either without fuel or damaged by strikes, he said.
In central Gaza, outside the northern combat zone, the area’s civil defense director has no working heavy equipment at all, including bulldozers and cranes.
“We actually don’t have fuel to keep the sole bulldozer we have operating,” said Rami Ali al-Aidei.
At least five bulldozers are needed just to search a series of collapsed highrise buildings in the town of Deir al-Balah, he said.
This means that bodies, and the desperate people searching for them, are not the focus.
“We’re prioritizing areas where we think we will find survivors,” said Bassal.
‘Indescribable’
On Tuesday, 28 days after an airstrike flattened his home, Izzel-Din alMoghari found his cousin’s body.
Twenty-four people from
his extended family lived in the home in the Bureij refugee camp. All but three were killed.
Eight are still missing. A bulldozer came three days after the strike to clear the road, then left quickly for another collapsed building. The bulldozer came again Tuesday and helped find alMoghari’s cousin.
Al-Moghari then went back into the wreckage in search of his father and other relatives.
“I am stunned,” he said. “What we lived through is indescribable.”
Gaza has become a place where many families are denied even the comfort of a funeral.
Al-Darawi, the man searching for his cousins, understands that.
“Those who found their dead are lucky,” he said.
In the war
The United Nations was forced to stop deliveries of food and other necessities to Gaza on Friday and warned of the growing possibility of widespread starvation after internet and telephone services collapsed in the besieged enclave because of a lack of fuel.
Israel announced that it will allow for the first time two tanker trucks of fuel daily into Gaza for the U.N. and communications systems. The amount is about half of what the U.N. said it needs to conduct lifesaving functions for hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza, including fueling water systems, hospitals, bakeries and its trucks delivering aid.
Israel has barred entry of fuel since the start of the war, saying it would be diverted by Hamas for military means. It has also blocked food, water and other supplies except for a trickle of aid from Egypt that aid workers say falls far short of what’s needed.
The communications blackout, now in its second day, largely cuts off Gaza’s 2.3 million people from one another and the outside world.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, couldn’t bring in its aid convoy Friday because of the communications cut-off and won’t be able to as long it continues, said spokesperson Juliette Touma.
“An extended blackout means an extended suspension of our humanitarian operations in the Gaza Strip,” Touma told The Associated Press.
Israeli forces have signaled they could expand their offensive toward Gaza’s south even while continuing operations in the north. Troops have been searching the territory’s biggest hospital for traces of a Hamas command center the military alleges was located under the building.
On Friday, the Israeli military said it found the body of another hostage, identifying her as Cpl. Noa Marciano. Marciano’s body was recovered in a building adjacent to Shifa, the military said, like that of another hostage found Thursday, Yehudit Weiss.
After an American request, Israel agreed to allow two tanker trucks of fuel into the Gaza Strip each day — a quantity that national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi called “very minimal.” COGAT, the Israeli military body responsible for Palestinian affairs, said it would amount to 60,000 liters (15,850 gallons) a day for the U.N.
A U.S. State Department official said Israel also agreed to let in 2,640 gallons for the communications network.
Touma said UNRWA and other humanitarian groups need at least 31,700 gallons a day to run lifesaving functions. It was not immediately know if the fuel for communications would be enough to revive the network.
Airstrikes continued to hammer the southern sector of Gaza, where most of the territory’s population is now sheltering. Among them are hundreds of thousands of people who heeded Israel’s calls to evacuate Gaza City and the north to get out of the way of its ground offensive.
In the Nusseirat refugee camp, a strike crushed a building to rubble killing at least 41 people, staff at the nearby hospital said. Residents said dozens more were buried in the wreckage.
Early morning strikes outside the city of Khan Younis killed 11 members of a family who had evacuated from Gaza City. Dozens of wounded, including babies and young children, streamed into the nearby hospital.