Thousands of bodies lie buried in rubble in Gaza. Families dig to retrieve them, often by hand

More than five weeks into Israel’s war against Hamas, some streets now look more like cemeteries.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: The wreckage continues block after destroyed block. The smell is nauseating. Every day, hundreds of people claw through tons of rubble with shovels, iron bars and their bare hands. They are looking for the bodies of their children. Their parents. Their neighbors. They were all killed in Israeli rocket attacks. The bodies lie there, somewhere in the endless acres of destruction.

More than five weeks into Israel’s war against Hamas, some streets now look more like cemeteries. Officials in Gaza say they do not have the equipment, manpower or fuel to search 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 bases in Gaza’s busy neighborhoods. Israel is targeting these strongholds.

But the victims are often ordinary Palestinians, many of whom have yet to be found.

Omar al-Darawi and his neighbors have spent weeks searching the ruins of a few four-story houses in central Gaza. Forty-five people lived in the houses; 32 were killed. In the first days after the attack, 27 bodies were recovered.

The five who are still missing are cousins ​​of al-Darawi.

Among them is Amani, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mother who died with her husband and their four children. There is Aliaa, 28, who took care of her elderly parents. There is 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 journalism student. The smell has become unbearable.

“We can’t stop,” he said. “We just want to find them and bury them” before their bodies are lost forever in the rubble.

According to Palestinian health authorities, more than 11,400 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and minors. The UN Humanitarian Affairs Office estimates that around 2,700 people, including 1,500 children, are missing and believed to be buried in the ruins.

The missing have added to the pain of Gaza’s predominantly Muslim families. Islam calls for the dead to be buried quickly – within 24 hours if possible – with the shrouded bodies turned towards the holy city of Mecca. Traditionally, the body is washed by family members with soap and perfumed water, and prayers for forgiveness are said at the grave.

The search is especially difficult in northern Gaza, including Gaza City, where Israeli ground forces are battling Hamas militants. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled south, terrified by the fighting and pressured by Israeli warnings to evacuate. But even in the south, continued Israeli airstrikes and shelling mean that there is no security anywhere in the small area.

At the Palestinian Ministry of Civil Protection, Gaza’s main search and rescue force, more than 20 workers have been killed and more than 100 injured since the start of the war, said Mahmoud Bassal, spokesman for the department.

More than half of the vehicles are now out of fuel or damaged by strikes, he said.

In central Gaza, outside the northern combat zone, the area’s civil defense director has no heavy equipment at all, including bulldozers and cranes.

“We actually don’t have fuel to keep the only bulldozer we have running,” says Rami Ali al-Aidei.

At least five large bulldozers are needed 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 who search for them, are not the focus.

“We are prioritizing areas where we think we will find survivors,” Bassal said.

As a result, the search for bodies often falls to family members, or volunteers such as Bilal Abu Sama, a former freelance journalist.

He names a handful of victims of Deir al-Balah: ten corpses still lost in what remains of the al-Salam Mosque; two dozen bodies missing from a destroyed house; Ten missing in new attack on mosque.

‘Will those bodies remain under the rubble until the war is over? Okay, when will the war end?’ said Abu Sama, 30, describing families digging through the wreckage without tools. “The bodies will be decomposed. Many of them have already been disbanded.”

On Tuesday, 28 days after an airstrike leveled his house, Izzel-Din al-Moghari found his cousin’s body.

Twenty-four people from his extended family lived in the house, in the Bureij refugee camp. All but three were killed.

Eight are still missing.

Three days after the attack, a civil defense bulldozer came to clear the road and then quickly left for another collapsed building. The bulldozer came again on Tuesday and helped find Al-Moghari’s cousin.

After finding his cousin, al-Moghari returned to the wreckage in search of his father and other relatives.

“I’m stunned,” he said. “What we experienced is indescribable.”

Gaza has become a place where many families are denied even the comfort of a funeral.

Al-Darawi, the man looking for his cousins, understands that.

“Those who found their dead are lucky,” he said.