The wreckage goes on for𒉰 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. Thei🔥r 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 behi🉐nd 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 strongholdꦜs.
But the victi𒐪ms are often everyday Palestinians, many of whom have yet to be found.
Omar al-Daraw💜i and his neighbors have spent w🧸eeks 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.
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 agin🐷g parents. There's another Amani, who💮 died with her 14-year-old daughter. Her husband and their five sons survived.
“The situat🐭ion has become worse every day,” said the 23-year-old, who was once 𝔉a college journalism student. The smell has become unbearable.
“We can't stop,” he saiꦅd. “We just want to find and bury them” before their bodies are lost in the rubble forever.
T💮he Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says the attacks have killed more than 11,200 people, two-thirds of them women and children. The U.N. humanitarian affairs office estimates that about 2,700 people, including 1,50♛0 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 Mecca. Traditionally, the body is washed by family members with soap and scented water, and pray🌱ers 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 c🍌ombat 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 bulld🥀ozers 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 i𒀰n the coastal town of Deir al-Balah, he said.
This means that bodies, andꦿ the desperate people searching for them, are not the focus🅘.
“We're prior🌠itizing areas where we 𒆙think we will find survivors,” said Bassal.
As a re🦄su♛lt, 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 𝓰still 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 ꧑end?” 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-𒐪Din al-Moghari found his cousin's body.
Twenty-four people from his extended family lived in th💧e 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, thenꩵ left quickly for another collaﷺpsed building. The bulldozer came again Tuesday and helped find al-Moghari's cousin.
After finding his cousin, al-Moghari went back into the wreckage i🌊n search of his father and other relatives✤.
"I am stunned,” he said. “What we lived through is indescribabl🅺e📖.”
Gaza has become a place where many famili♛es are denied even the co👍mfort of a funeral.
Al-Darawi, the man searching for his cousins, understands that. “Those who found their dead are lu✤cky," he said🐟.
