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Still Governing Among the Ruins: How Gaza’s Civil Administration Survived the War

• CrossFireArabia
• August 25, 2026

CROSSFIREARABIA — Almost everything needed to run a government has been attacked or disrupted in Gaza: Offices, police stations, roads, communications networks, schools, hospitals, municipal equipment and the homes of the civil servants themselves.

Yet the administrative machinery has not entirely stopped.

Nearly three years after the beginning of the war, an extraordinary and politically consequential reality remains visible beneath Gaza’s physical destruction: Civil servants continue reporting for duty, police officers still attempt to maintain public order, Civil Defence crews dig bodies from collapsed buildings, health officials maintain casualty and hospital records, agricultural officials intervene in food-market problems, local-government employees work on water and roads, and education officials continue trying to organize schooling.

Gaza’s administration today bears little resemblance to a normally functioning government. It operates from damaged buildings, temporary locations and whatever facilities remain available. Salaries have largely disappeared. Equipment is scarce. Thousands of employees have themselves been displaced or bereaved.

But the administration continues.

And that distinction — between a government that functions normally and an administrative structure that simply refuses to cease functioning — is important.

In August, the Government Media Office made the point unusually explicitly while calling upon the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza to enter the Strip and assume its responsibilities.

The office said administrative, legal and logistical preparations for transferring responsibilities had been completed, but added that the existing technical and professional cadres would continue carrying out their duties so that essential services continued and an administrative vacuum did not develop.

That statement says much about what remains underneath Gaza’s ruins.

The 40,000

Perhaps the least visible survivors of the war are Gaza’s government employees.

Estimates associated with discussions over Gaza’s future administration have put the number of existing civil and security personnel at roughly 40,000.

They include teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, accountants, ministry administrators, municipal employees, technicians, police officers, Civil Defence personnel and thousands of other public-sector workers.

Their existence has now become one of the issues surrounding the proposed transfer of administration to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza.

But “employee” has acquired an entirely different meaning in Gaza.

The Palestine Information Center reported in June that government employees were no longer receiving anything resembling a normal salary. Some were waiting roughly 100 days for payments of no more than 1,000 shekels.

Yet many continued working.

The Gaza public-sector employees’ union said in July that employees had continued carrying out their professional and public duties despite what it described as extraordinarily harsh circumstances.

This creates one of the paradoxes of post-war Gaza: The state payroll has effectively ceased functioning normally, while portions of the workforce supported by that payroll continue to work.

A policeman interviewed by the Palestine Information Center described being unable to meet the basic needs of his five children.

He was still a policeman.

Police Without Police Stations

Nowhere is the survival of the administrative structure more visible — or more dangerous — than in Gaza’s police.

Police officers continue appearing in streets and markets and performing public-order duties. The Interior Ministry says police also assist humanitarian organizations and protect public and private property.

The ministry stated in July that police were working to facilitate the operations of local and international relief organizations.

But policing has come at an enormous cost.

The Interior Ministry says Israeli forces have repeatedly targeted police personnel while they were performing internal-security duties.

That continued in August.

A strike on a police facility in Gaza City killed a group of senior officers, according to the Palestine Information Center. Among those named were Brigadier General Ayman Mahmoud Jundiya, acting Gaza Governorate police chief; Colonel Osama Hashem al-Hajin, director of Gaza police operations; and Colonel Fatina Abdel-Jabbar al-Sahar, head of the women’s police department in the governorate.

The Interior Ministry said other senior police officials had previously been killed, including the northern Gaza police chief, the head of internal security in the central governorate and the commander of the Jabalia camp police station.

Israel has alledged that Hamas uses elements of Gaza’s governing and security apparatus for military purposes and has described some people it targets as Hamas operatives. Palestinian officials reject the characterization of Gaza’s civilian police force as a legitimate military target.

Whatever the competing arguments, the consequence on the ground is unmistakable.

Gaza still has police.

And policemen are still dying while performing police work.

Civil Defence: Digging Up Gaza’s Dead

There may be no more haunting example of a functioning public institution than Gaza’s Civil Defence.

Its crews are no longer principally dealing with ordinary fires, traffic accidents or building emergencies.

They are excavating the dead.

Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal estimated in February that approximately 8,000 bodies remained beneath destroyed buildings, with thousands of other people still classified as missing.

The work continues.

On 24 August, Civil Defence official Mohammed Abu Dan reported that crews had recovered the remains of nine members of the Salmi family from a destroyed house in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood.

They had been underneath the ruins since the house was struck on 20 November 2023.

Days earlier, Civil Defence crews recovered 12 bodies from the ruins of the Batniji family home in Zeitoun.

During early August, teams recovered 112 bodies belonging to the Abu Sharia and Hassaina families from a destroyed residential area in the Sabra neighbourhood.

Another 50 bodies recovered from several Gaza City neighbourhoods were gathered at Al-Shifa Medical Complex before burial.

Some had remained underneath their homes for almost three years.

The crews frequently work with rudimentary equipment because the heavy machinery required for systematic excavation remains desperately scarce.

This is administration in its most elemental form: Government employees attempting to give families back their dead.

Clearing the Roads

The enormous debris field covering Gaza has created another government service almost unknown before the war: Keeping a devastated territory physically traversable.

The Ministry of Local Government announced in May that it had begun a field programme with municipalities and the Egyptian committee to reopen and widen roads and remove debris from destroyed buildings.

Work initially included Gaza City, Khan Younis, Jabalia and al-Mughraqa.

Crews have been clearing principal and secondary roads blocked by collapsed towers and apartment buildings.

The significance goes beyond traffic.

Without passable roads, ambulances cannot reach hospitals. Water tankers cannot reach displacement camps. Food cannot reach markets. Civil Defence machinery cannot reach collapsed buildings.

Removing rubble has therefore become part of keeping the entire remaining administrative system alive.

Water

The same Ministry of Local Government was still convening technical meetings in June.

It adopted a plan with the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility and municipalities to protect Gaza’s principal water pipelines and reduce losses from damaged or unauthorized connections.

That sounds almost mundane.

In Gaza it is anything but mundane.

A ministry capable of convening municipal authorities, identifying infrastructure problems and producing a water-management plan is demonstrating that a layer of technical administration has survived the destruction.

The buildings may disappear.

The engineers remain.

The Health Ministry

The Ministry of Health provides perhaps the clearest example of institutional continuity.

Its hospitals have been devastated and its resources depleted, yet the ministry continues producing daily and periodic statistics, registering casualties and recoveries from beneath rubble and coordinating what remains of Gaza’s medical system.

On 15 August, the ministry warned that only 12 of Gaza’s original 34 oxygen stations remained operational.

The surviving stations were operating above capacity while suffering repeated mechanical failures.

Yet the ministry was still collecting the information.

It was still receiving reports from hospitals.

It was still counting admissions, deaths and injuries.

It was still recording bodies recovered from beneath the ruins.

That continuing statistical infrastructure is itself significant. International news organizations, humanitarian bodies and researchers routinely depend upon Gaza’s health authorities because there is no alternative system capable of maintaining a comparable territory-wide casualty database under the circumstances.

Hospitals have been destroyed.

The health bureaucracy has not completely disappeared with them.

Education Among the Tents

Education presents a similar picture.

There is no conventional education system remaining in large areas of Gaza. Schools have been destroyed, damaged or converted into displacement shelters.

Nevertheless, educational administration continues.

In April the Education Ministry was still issuing territory-wide instructions concerning schools and educational points.

By August, improvised face-to-face schooling was appearing again, including the “Mecca School” established among displacement tents in the Mawasi area.

Classes take place in tents, temporary classrooms and improvised educational points.

This cannot replace Gaza’s destroyed school system.

But teachers are teaching, education officials are coordinating and children are once again being placed into organized learning environments.

The institution has contracted into something primitive.

It has not vanished.

Agriculture and Food

The Agriculture Ministry is also still operating.

In April it publicly addressed the price of agricultural produce entering Gaza and described measures intended to increase supply and reduce prices.

The ministry said it was encouraging traders to import larger quantities while attempting to encourage farmers to increase cultivated acreage.

Again, the importance is not simply agricultural.

A ministry was gathering market information, examining prices, communicating with traders and farmers and attempting to influence food availability.

Those are administrative functions.

They were being performed in the middle of an enclave where agriculture itself had been devastated.

The Government Media Office

Then there is the Government Media Office.

It has become one of the most visible surviving institutions.

Director-General Ismail al-Thawabta and his staff continue issuing statistics, statements and briefings on deaths, humanitarian conditions, border crossings, aid deliveries and ceasefire violations.

On 24 August the office issued another detailed assessment of alleged ceasefire violations, saying it had recorded 4,379 violations over 315 days.

The figures are Palestinian government figures and should be identified as such rather than treated as independently verified statistics.

But their production demonstrates something else.

Somebody is still gathering information.

Somebody is communicating with hospitals, ministries, crossings and emergency services.

Somebody is collating the figures.

Somebody is publishing them.

That bureaucracy survived.

The Aid Battle

Aid statistics have themselves become part of the political struggle.

One correction is important here: the October 2025 ceasefire arrangements called for approximately 600 trucks per day, rather than 500.

The Gaza Government Media Office subsequently argued that actual deliveries repeatedly fell drastically below that level.

Israel and US officials have at various points presented considerably higher aid-entry figures, meaning the methodology — trucks inspected, trucks crossing the boundary, or trucks actually reaching their intended destinations — matters when comparing claims.

The safest conclusion is therefore not that one particular daily number is universally accepted, but that the 600-truck target formed part of the ceasefire arrangement and Palestinian authorities repeatedly maintained that actual humanitarian deliveries fell far short of Gaza’s needs and, during significant periods, below the agreed level.

Government Without Buildings

What survives in Gaza therefore should not be confused with normal government.

It is government stripped almost to its human skeleton.

An engineer with no ministry building.

A policeman whose station has been bombed.

A teacher without a classroom.

A doctor in a partially functioning hospital.

A Civil Defence worker digging through concrete without adequate machinery.

A municipal employee trying to keep water flowing through shattered pipes.

An administrator receiving little or no regular salary.

Yet together they constitute something important: institutional memory and administrative continuity.

This helps explain why Gaza’s roughly 40,000 existing civil and security employees have become such a significant question in negotiations over what comes next.

Removing an administration on paper is relatively straightforward.

Replacing tens of thousands of teachers, engineers, doctors, nurses, technicians, municipal employees, clerks, police officers and emergency workers who know how Gaza operates is something else entirely.

Indeed, the Gaza Government Media Office has now explicitly stated that these professional and technical cadres are prepared to continue working under the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza.

That suggests the argument over Gaza’s future is gradually shifting.

The question may no longer simply be whether the old governmental structure survives.

It is who inherits the people who kept it functioning.

Netanyahu’s Unfinished Objective

For the Netanyahu government, this presents a profound political problem.

Israel has spent nearly three years systematically attacking what it identifies as Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. Enormous parts of Gaza’s physical infrastructure have consequently been destroyed.

But destroying buildings is not synonymous with eliminating administration.

The distinction between Hamas as a political-military organization and the tens of thousands of Palestinians employed in Gaza’s civilian institutions is becoming increasingly important.

A nurse is still needed regardless of who governs Gaza.

So is an engineer.

So is a sanitation worker.

So is a teacher.

So is an ambulance dispatcher.

So is somebody who knows where the underground water pipes run.

Even Gaza’s proposed new administration will require precisely these people if it is ever to govern the territory effectively.

That may ultimately prove to be one of the most consequential realities to emerge from the destruction.

Israel has demonstrated that it can destroy ministries.

It can destroy police stations.

It can destroy schools, roads and municipal buildings.

It can kill officials.

But after nearly three years of war, Gaza still contains an administrative society — tens of thousands of people possessing the knowledge required to operate hospitals, municipalities, emergency services, schools and public institutions.

The Government Media Office’s August announcement may therefore contain the essence of the story.

The political authority can be transferred.

The name at the top can change.

The administrative structure can be reorganized.

But the technical and professional employees will continue working.

Amid Gaza’s ruins, they already are.

Gaza: Bringing the Dead Home From Beneath the Rubble

• marwan
• August 25, 2026

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.