CrossFireArabia
GAZA — Almost three years after Israeli airstrikes brought apartment blocks and family homes crashing down across the Gaza Strip, another kind of rescue operation is taking place among the ruins.
This time, the Civil Defense teams are not searching for survivors.They are searching for the dead.
Day after day, crews move from one shattered house to another, lifting concrete, cutting through twisted reinforcing bars and carefully searching through layers of debris for bodies and human remains that have lain there since the earliest months of the war.
For thousands of Palestinian families, the war has therefore never quite reached an ending. There has been no funeral, no grave to visit and, in some cases, no certainty about what happened to a husband, a wife, a parent or a child.
The Palestinian Information Center reported on August 20 that about 8,000 Palestinian bodies were still believed to be beneath the rubble across Gaza. Earlier, in late June, Gaza Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal put the figure at approximately 8,500 bodies and remains, illustrating the difficulty of establishing a definitive number amid the scale of destruction and the thousands still officially regarded as missing.
And the bodies are still coming out.
On August 24, Civil Defense recovery official Mohammed Abu Dan said teams had recovered the remains of nine members of the Salmi family from their destroyed home in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood. The house had been struck on November 20, 2023. Seventeen members of the family were believed to have been inside.
A day earlier, Abu Dan reported another operation in Zeitoun in which crews recovered four sets of remains from the Abu Shamala family home after two days of searching, before moving to another destroyed house where five more bodies were found.
These are not isolated searches. They have become a grim routine.
One Excavator Against a City of Rubble
The scale of the task bears little relationship to the equipment available to carry it out.
Civil Defense said in July that one phase of the recovery project was operating with essentially one excavator, one loader and one truck, with support from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The teams were trying to work their way through neighbourhoods containing thousands of missing people.
PIC reported in June that a single excavator could be seen working in Gaza City while crews searched for thousands of bodies. Basal warned that, at such a pace, completing the operation could take years.
Civil Defense says the shortage is not simply a question of damage to its own fleet. Palestinian officials repeatedly say Israel has prevented the entry of the heavy machinery, specialist equipment and replacement vehicles required to remove massive slabs of reinforced concrete safely and quickly. PIC reported again on August 20 that restrictions on bringing heavy equipment into Gaza remained one of the principal obstacles to reaching those buried beneath destroyed homes.
So men trained for rescue frequently find themselves doing work that should require cranes, excavators and specialist recovery machinery with hand tools and limited mechanical assistance.
The result is painfully slow progress.
In February, the Sanad News Agency followed Civil Defense crews into Sheikh Radwan after the search resumed at the ruins of a home bombed in December 2023.
More than 120 displaced people had reportedly been sheltering there.
For survivor Ramzi Salem, the arrival of Civil Defense came after more than two years of appeals for machinery.
There was still only limited equipment.
Much of the digging had to be done manually.
Eventually, 56 bodies were recovered from the site
Salem described each recovery as reopening the original trauma.
“Every body that comes out, it is as if the bombing happens again,” he told Sanad.
But there was another emotion alongside the pain: Relief that the dead could finally be buried.
For families such as Salem’s, recovery does not reverse the loss. It gives the loss a place.
Waiting Beside the House
Perhaps that is why families continue returning to the rubble.
Twelve-year-old Muhammad Riyadh Ghaboun stood beside what remained of his family’s house in the Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City while Civil Defense teams worked nearby.
PIC described the boy as waiting not for his home to be rebuilt, but for the remains of family members buried beneath it for months.
What he wanted was much simpler: for them finally to have graves.
Across Gaza, similar families have lived through a peculiar form of bereavement in which death is understood but burial remains suspended.
Some know exactly where their relatives died. They can point towards a particular room beneath a collapsed ceiling or identify approximately where someone had been sleeping when the building was hit.
Others do not know whether the missing person lies beneath rubble, was killed elsewhere or was detained.
In February, Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal said that besides the thousands of bodies thought to be trapped beneath destroyed buildings, more than 3,000 people remained missing without confirmed information about their fate.
That uncertainty changes mourning itself.
A grave normally confirms death. In Gaza, thousands of families have been denied even that confirmation.
Digging For His Own Family
Few accounts reveal the psychological cost as starkly as that of Mahmoud Khalla.
His family home was struck on December 21, 2023.
According to his testimony to the Palestinian Safa news agency, around 39 relatives were killed: His mother and father, his wife and children, siblings, their spouses and children, as well as members of his extended family.
Only 12 bodies could initially be buried.
The rest remained beneath the wreckage.
Khalla waited.
And waited.
Twenty-nine months passed.
When the heavy equipment he had hoped would arrive still had not materialised, he and neighbours began digging themselves with shovels, hammers and other basic tools.
They had to break through four collapsed ceilings.
With every blow, Khalla said, he felt himself getting physically closer to his children and siblings while knowing that what he might eventually find would no longer resemble the people he remembered.
The recovered remains included his uncle. Bones believed to belong to children could not immediately be identified and were recorded as unidentified remains.
His experience exposes another agonising stage of the process.
Finding human remains does not necessarily mean knowing whose remains they are.
When A Body No Longer Has A Face
After months or years beneath rubble, heat, dust and moisture, Civil Defense teams frequently recover skeletonised remains, fragmented bones or incomplete bodies.
Identification can therefore become extraordinarily difficult.
Mahmoud Ashour, spokesman for Gaza’s forensic evidence department, said in January that many recovered bodies had deteriorated into skeletal remains or decomposed fragments.
The most important tool needed to resolve uncertain identities—DNA testing—is severely restricted by the absence of the necessary laboratory equipment, according to Ashour.
This means identification may begin with whatever information survives.
Relatives can sometimes recognise clothing.
They may identify jewellery, a personal item or a distinctive physical feature.
Safa reported in April that some families had managed to identify recovered relatives through physical characteristics or clothing after decomposition made ordinary visual recognition impossible.
Where identification is possible, the remains are transferred through the appropriate medical and forensic procedures before burial.
In one November recovery operation at the destroyed Abu Hamada family home in Maghazi refugee camp, Civil Defense reported recovering the remains of 14 people, including women and children. Relatives identified them and the remains were transferred to the forensic medicine department at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital before burial.
Where families cannot identify the remains, the process becomes more complicated.
Forensic personnel document what they can. Earlier Gaza procedures have included photographing distinguishing characteristics, assigning identification numbers and preserving available information so relatives may eventually be able to make a match.
But DNA testing would offer a far more reliable answer.
Ashour has called for equipment as well as a database containing genetic information from families of missing people so recovered remains can be matched scientifically.
Without it, some families may finally receive bones from beneath a house and still not know whether those bones belong to the person they have spent years waiting for.
The Men Who Must Keep Looking
There is another side to these operations that receives less attention: The Civil Defense officers themselves.
Their work once centred on pulling people alive from collapsed buildings.
Now they are regularly required to dismantle the physical remains of destroyed homes while recovering decomposed bodies, skeletons and fragments belonging to children, women and entire families.
The recovery crews know that relatives are often standing only metres away.
A piece of fabric or a bone fragment can suddenly become the answer to a question a family has been asking for two or three years.
Civil Defense official Abdullah Al-Majdalawi described the difficulty after remains recovered from Sheikh Radwan cemetery had become mixed following destruction and bulldozing. Many of those recovered were reduced to skeletal remains and fragments.
He summed up the human problem behind forensic identification with a stark question:
“How do names turn into numbers?”
That is, in many ways, the dilemma confronting Gaza’s recovery teams.
They work among numbers—eight bodies here, nine there, 47 from one house, 50 collected at Al-Shifa Medical Complex.
But every number belongs to somebody.
In July, Civil Defense recovered 47 bodies and sets of remains from the Al-Hassaina family home in Sabra. Another 36 people were still believed to be somewhere beneath the ruined structure, and officials said the force of the explosion might even have displaced remains into neighbouring properties.
That makes the work forensic as much as mechanical.
Crews cannot simply drive an excavator through a pile of concrete.
Each layer may conceal remains. Each fragment has potential meaning. Each discovery must be handled carefully enough that identification is still possible afterwards.
Speed matters.
But so does dignity.
Fifty Funerals, Nearly Three Years Late
On August 20, Palestinians gathered in Gaza City to bury the remains of 50 people recovered from beneath demolished homes in neighbourhoods including Tal Al-Hawa, Zeitoun, Sabra, Sheikh Radwan and Al-Shati.
Some belonged to the Sawafiri, Batniji and Gharbiya families.
Many had been beneath the debris since 2023.
PIC reported that much of what was recovered was no longer complete bodies but bone fragments, remains and personal belongings. Civil Defense officials said many were women and children.
For those families, the funerals came almost three years late.
For thousands more, there is still no funeral.
There is only the house.
The rubble.
And the waiting.
Parents wait for children. Children wait for fathers and mothers. Husbands and wives live with a loss that is simultaneously certain and unfinished.
Some return repeatedly to the place where they believe a relative lies.
Some ask Civil Defense when their street will finally appear on the recovery schedule.
Some search themselves.
And Civil Defense teams continue moving through Gaza’s destroyed neighbourhoods, one house at a time.
Their progress is measurable in bodies brought home—but against an estimated 8,000 still beneath the wreckage, each recovery also shows how immense the task remains.
The operation is therefore no longer simply a search through rubble.
It is a race to restore identities before time erases more of them.
For the families standing beside Gaza’s ruins, finding the dead does not bring the people they love back.
But after years of looking towards a collapsed house and knowing someone is still beneath it, recovery offers something that war has denied them for far too long:
a name,
a body,
a funeral,
and somewhere to mourn.
