In Gaza, countless bodies buried beneath the rubble
Shadow death toll grows with each airstrike
A curly-haired young man shakes as he bends over the mound of smashed concrete that used to be his friend’s home. He clutches his rain-spotted iPhone in his trembling hands, but there is no answer. “Please God, Ahmed,” he sobs in a video posted on social media. “Please God.”
A father crawls over a mountain of gray concrete shards, his right ear pressed to the dust. “I can’t hear you, love,” he tells his absent children in a different video shared on Instagram and verified by The New York Times. He scrabbles over a few yards to try again. “Salma! Said!” he yells, hitting his dusty hammer against the mute concrete over and over, before breaking down. “Said,” he cries, “didn’t I tell you to take care of your sister?”
Another man on another rubble heap is looking for his wife and his children, Rahaf, 6, and Aboud, 4. “Rahaf,” he cries, leaning forward to scan the twisted pile of gray before him. “What has she done to deserve this?”
The Gaza Strip has become a 140-square-mile graveyard, each destroyed building a jagged tomb for those buried within.
The most recent health ministry estimate for the number of people missing in Gaza is about 7,000. But that figure has not been updated since November. Gaza and aid officials say thousands more have most likely been added to that toll in the weeks and months since then.
Some were buried too hastily to be counted. Others lie decomposing in the open, in places too dangerous to be reached, or have simply disappeared amid the fighting, the chaos and ongoing Israeli detentions.
The rest, in all likelihood, remain trapped under the rubble.
The piles of debris have been multiplying ever since Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials. Israel launched its retaliatory war, and the number of search-and-rescue operations — both professional and, increasingly, amateur — also soared.
After airstrikes, a small crowd of would-be rescuers gathers. In Instagram videos like the ones described above, the searchers — a mix of professional civil defense workers, family members, and neighbors — can be seen clambering over and onto the dusty wreckage of homes and buildings to dig.
But hopes dwindle quickly. The people they are looking for are usually found dead beneath the wreckage — days, weeks, or even months later.
The buried make up a shadow death toll in Gaza, a leaden asterisk to the health ministry’s official tally of more than 31,000 dead, and an open wound for families who hope against hope for a miracle.
Most families have accepted that their missing are dead, and it is unclear how much of the estimate of those unaccounted for is already reflected in the official death toll. The continuing shelling, crossfire and airstrikes often make it too dangerous to sift through the wreckage for the bodies. Other times, relatives are too far away, having separated from the rest of their families in the search for somewhere safer.
Photographs that have emerged of Gaza’s rubble heaps testify to families’ intention to recover the dead someday: “Omar Al Riyati and Osama Badawi are under the rubble,” reads the spray paint on a tarp draped across the door of one blown-out building.
When a multistory building collapses, it is impossible to comb the hill of debris without heavy machines or fuel to power them. Often, neither is available.
Gaza has been under a debilitating blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt since Hamas took control of the strip in 2007, and the equipment typically used to rescue people after earthquakes and other events of mass destruction are largely forbidden from entering the territory.
Across all of Gaza, Ahmed Abu Shehab, a civil defense worker in the territory, is aware of only two excavators available for the task. Without them, rescuers rely on shovels, drills, and their own hands: a grimly monotonous mission, undertaken mostly by men running on anger and grief but little food, water, or rest.
Last fall, Abu Shehab said he was part of a team that used bulldozers and an excavator to pull dozens of people from the ruins of a three-story house — a lengthy job, given the size of the building. It took 48 hours to reach the people inside. By then, all of them had died, he said.
In late October, when an airstrike brought down a multistory building in Al Nuseirat, there was so much wreckage that a bulldozer first had to come and clear the road, said Ahmed Ismael, 30. The two families in the building next door were not spared: More than a dozen people died there, including several children, said Ismael, a nurse whose cousin’s family was among the dead.
The extended family had sought refuge there after leaving their own home in Sheikh Radwan, in Gaza City, early in the war, Ismael said. They had chosen to split up among several locations so that if a group sheltering in one place was killed, the others might survive.
That was what happened. Searchers had managed to pull some bodies from the second floor by digging with their hands, but Ismael said his cousin, Salwa, one of her sons and her brother, Mahmoud, were still buried. So were five members of the family hosting them.
The bulldozer was no help. The buildings had been too massive, and after clearing the road, the driver told the diggers that he did not have enough fuel in any case, Ismael said.
Calling 101, the Gaza equivalent of 911, is of little use: Communications networks are weak, erratic, or nonfunctional. Instead, many people have taken to braving the heavy fighting and rubble-choked streets to request help in person at civil defense headquarters.
Even if they do get through, the lack of fuel and the continuing attacks mean ambulances and rescue workers are hardpressed to move around Gaza to answer their pleas.
Since mid-November, after the Israeli military occupied most of northern Gaza and Gaza City, Palestinian Red Crescent Society teams have been unable to enter that part of the strip freely, said Nebal Fesakh, a spokesperson for the group. There is nothing they can do to respond to desperate calls on the 101 line from people trapped there or to treat the wounded, to take away a body, to dig for the missing.