Gaza's shadow death toll: Bodies beneath rubble
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 another jagged tomb for those still 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 most likely have 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.
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.