Gaza: Thousands of Bodies Lie Buried in Rubble. Families Dig to Retrieve Them, Often by Hand

Gaza: Thousands of Bodies Lie Buried in Rubble. Families Dig to Retrieve Them, Often by Hand
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Gaza: Thousands of Bodies Lie Buried in Rubble. Families Dig to Retrieve Them, Often by Hand

Gaza: Thousands of Bodies Lie Buried in Rubble. Families Dig to Retrieve Them, Often by Hand

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 endless acres of destruction.

More than five weeks into Israel’s war against Hamas, some streets are now 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.

Hamas, the militant group behind the deadly Oct. 7 attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel, has many of its bases within Gaza’s crowded neighborhoods. Israel is targeting those strongholds.

But 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, The Associated Press reported.

They include Amani, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom who died with her husband and their four children. There’s Aliaa, 28, who was taking care of her aging parents. There’s another Amani, who died with her 14-year-old 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.

More than 11,400 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and minors, according to Palestinian health authorities. The UN humanitarian affairs office estimates that about 2,700 people, including 1,500 children, are missing and believed buried in the ruins.

The missing have added 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 Makkah. 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. But even in the south, continued Israeli airstrikes and shelling mean nowhere is safe in the tiny territory.

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 Mahmoud Bassal, the department spokesman.

More than half of its vehicles are now either without fuel or have been 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 large bulldozers are needed just to search a series of collapsed high-rise buildings in the coastal 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.

As a result, the search for bodies often falls to relatives, or to volunteers like Bilal Abu Sama, a former freelance journalist.

He ticks off a handful of Deir al-Balah’s victims: 10 corpses still lost in what is left of the al-Salam Mosque; two dozen bodies missing in a destroyed home; 10 missing in another mosque attack.

“Will those bodies remain under the rubble until the war ends? OK, when will the war end?” said Abu Sama, 30, describing how families dig through the wreckage without any tools. “The bodies will be decomposed. Many of them have already decomposed.”

On Tuesday, 28 days after an airstrike flattened his home, Izzel-Din al-Moghari 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 civil defense 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 al-Moghari's cousin.

After finding his cousin, al-Moghari 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 



Bereaved Gazans Dig Out Bodies from City Ruins, Give Them Graves 

A Palestinian walks amid the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Israeli offensive, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, January 22, 2025. (Reuters)
A Palestinian walks amid the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Israeli offensive, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, January 22, 2025. (Reuters)
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Bereaved Gazans Dig Out Bodies from City Ruins, Give Them Graves 

A Palestinian walks amid the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Israeli offensive, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, January 22, 2025. (Reuters)
A Palestinian walks amid the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Israeli offensive, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, January 22, 2025. (Reuters)

Guns may have fallen silent in Gaza, but for Mahmoud Abu Dalfa, the agony is not over. He is desperately searching for the bodies of his wife and five children trapped under the rubble of his house since the early months of the war.

Abu Dalfa's wife and children were among 35 of his extended family who were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit the building in Gaza City's Shejaia suburb in December 2023, he said. As bombs continued to fall, only three bodies were retrieved.

"My children are still under the rubble. I am trying to get them out... The civil defense came, they tried, but the destruction makes it difficult. We don't have the equipment here to extract martyrs. We need excavators and a lot of technical tools," Abu Dalfa told Reuters.

"My wife was killed along with all my five children - three daughters and two sons. I had triplets," he said.

Burials are usually carried out within a few hours of death in Muslim and Arab communities, and failure to retrieve bodies and ensure dignified burials is agonizing for bereaved families.

"I hope I can bring them out and make them a grave. That's all I want from this entire world. I don’t want them to build me a house or give me anything else. All I want is a grave for them - to get them out and make them a grave," said Abu Dalfa.

The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service and medical staff have recovered around 200 bodies since the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel came into effect on Sunday, halting a 15-month conflict that has killed more than 47,000 Gazans.

The war in Gaza was triggered when Palestinian Hamas fighters attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 as hostages, according to Israeli tallies. At least 94 of those hostages remain in Gaza.

Mahmoud Basal, the head of the service, said extraction operations have been challenged by the lack of earth-moving and heavy machinery, adding that Israel had destroyed several of their vehicles and killed at least 100 of their staff.

Basal estimates the bodies of around 10,000 Palestinians killed in the war are yet to be found and buried.

A UN damage assessment released this month showed that clearing over 50 million tons of rubble left in the aftermath of Israel's bombardment could take 21 years and cost up to $1.2 billion.

OPENING AID CROSSINGS

As hundreds of truckloads of aid flowed into Gaza since Sunday, officials from the Palestinian Authority, rivals to Hamas, held meetings with European officials to arrange to assume responsibilities at two vital crossing points with Egypt and Israel.

A Palestinian official familiar with the matter said Egypt sent bulldozers and some engineering vehicles to carry out repairs to the road on the Gaza side of the border that had been damaged by Israel's ground offensive.

Like Abu Dalfa, thousands of Gaza's 2.3 million residents are searching for the bodies of relatives either missing under the rubble or buried in mass graves during Israeli ground raids.

Rabah Abulias, a 68-year-old father who lost his son Ashraf in an Israeli attack, wants to give his son a proper grave.

"I know where Ashraf is buried, but his body is with dozens of others, there is no grave for him, there is no tomb stone that carries his name," he said via a chat app from Gaza City.

"I want to make him a grave, where I can visit him, talk to him and tell him I am sorry I wasn't there for him."