Reporting from Jerusalem
At some of the thousands of funerals in Gaza over the past 15 months, mourners have placed a bright orange vest over the body.
Vests are usually well worn and marked with dust, sometimes with blood. They belong to the Civil Defense, Gaza’s main emergency service.
During the Israeli bombing, the Civil Defense was responsible for pulling the living and the dead from the ruins. With the Gaza emergency, rescue workers have taken on some of the most harrowing jobs in the strip.
And they paid a high price. On Monday’s first full day of peace, the agency said 99 of its rescuers had been killed and 319 wounded, some with life-changing injuries.
When the Civil Defense buries its own, where possible, the vests of the dead are placed on their bodies.
“We put the vest there because our colleague sacrificed his soul in it,” Nooh al-Shaghnobi, a 24-year-old rescuer, said in a telephone interview from Gaza City.
“We hope that they will show God that this man did good with his life, that he saved others.”
Israel has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians in Gaza during the conflict – most of them women and children – and wounded more than 111,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN. A recent study published by the Lancet medical journal found that the death toll during the first nine months of the war may have been underestimated by more than 40%.
A fragile ceasefire that took effect last weekend is holding. But for Civil Protection rescuers, the next phase of work is just beginning.
The agency estimates that more than 10,000 people are buried under the vast sea of rubble across Gaza. The figure is based on information gathered during the war about who was in each building destroyed by Israel and who the agency knows has already been found.
In the areas that were completely occupied by Israeli forces during the destruction, they do not have detailed information and rely on the help of the residents. In the Tel el-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City on Tuesday, rescuer Al-Shaghnobi found a man with information about the fate of the flattened residential building.
“He told us that seven dead were found, but that the rest were an elderly gentleman, a child and an infant,” Al-Shaghnobi said.
“Fortunately, there was a private bulldozer nearby and we were able to excavate the top layer of rubble,” he said. “And underneath we found three skeletons that matched the description.”
Al-Shaghnobi gained a large following during the war by sharing his experiences on social media. Although he pixelates some images, others depict the horrors he and other young rescuers faced.
One video shows him under the rubble, carefully pulling out the baby’s body around the body of another small child, who is alive. Other pictures he sent to the BBC show the extreme nature of the rescue.
“It should become numb as time goes by,” said Al-Shagnobi, during a shift in Gaza City. “But it got worse. I feel more pain, not less. It’s harder to deal with. I saw 50 of my colleagues die in front of me. Who outside of Gaza can imagine that?”
As the first Israeli hostages were released from Gaza last week, in exchange for 90 Palestinians from Israeli prisons, Israeli authorities described extensive psychological support awaiting the returning hostages.
But for those who are experiencing horrors in Gaza, such support is extremely limited. None of the four rescuers who spoke to the BBC from Gaza this week said they had been offered counselling.
“We all need this,” said Mohammed Lafi, a 25-year-old rescuer in Gaza City, “but no one is talking about it.”
Lafi, who has been with the agency for six years, has a wife and a small son at home. “When I pull the baby’s body out of the rubble, I’m screaming to myself if he’s the same age as my son. My body is shaking.”
Even if counseling were widely available, “a year of therapy would not be enough for one day of this work,” said Abdullah al-Majdalawi, a 24-year-old Civil Protection worker who lives with his parents in Gaza City.
Al-Majdalawi said that when he returned home between shifts, he constantly did small jobs and chores, “because I became afraid of my own memories.”
“I’m very lonely now,” he said. “I don’t talk to others about what I saw. But I feel like my whole body is getting tight and I need some kind of therapy because things are building up.”
Civil Protection workers were seen as heroes from the outside, Al-Majdalawi said. “But they don’t see what’s going on inside. Inside, I’m waging a war against myself.”
As the ceasefire began, new images from Gaza showed scenes of near-total destruction, particularly in the enclave’s north. Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal said the agency hopes to pull the remaining dead from under the rubble within 100 days, but acknowledged it is a tough target, as they still lack bulldozers and other heavy equipment.
The Civil Defense has accused Israel of deliberately targeting and destroying its vehicles and equipment in the strikes – charges Israel denies. Rescuers told the BBC that they are currently working with simple hand tools such as hammers and have several work vehicles. “We have so little equipment that we need another civil defense to save the civil defense,” Al-Majdalawi said.
A spokesman for the agency said on Friday that they had been able to retrieve only 162 bodies since the ceasefire began nearly a week ago.
The U.N. aid coordination office OCHA has warned that the recovery of bodies could take years, due to a lack of equipment, personnel and, it estimates, 37 million tons of rubble packed with unexploded bombs and hazardous materials such as asbestos.
The amount of time many have been dead also makes the identification process difficult. At the European Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, people this week searched for their loved ones among the remains that were brought to the hospital and laid outside on white sheets. In many cases, the only option was to search for shoes, clothes or other personal belongings.
“I believe I will recognize my son immediately, even if his face has no features and is just a skeleton,” said Ali Ashour, a university professor, of his 18-year-old boy, Mahjoud.
I will recognize him because I am his father and I know him better than a million people, he said.
Ashour still held out hope that Mahjoud might be captured, he said, but planned to search for the dead every day until he knew. “Whenever they bring more remains, I will come,” he said. “And if I see my son, I will pick him up from among the other bodies and carry him away.”
Nisreen Shaaban was looking for her 16-year-old son, Moatassem, who she said left their home in Beit Hanoun for 15 minutes and never returned.
“I opened every shroud here looking for the clothes he was wearing, trying to smell him,” she said. She was surrounded by human remains. “I feel like I’m living in a cemetery,” she said. “It’s a city of horrors.”
The Civil Defense Agency estimates that nearly 3,000 people may have been incinerated in the bombing, denying some families an end to the search. But there are still many more than that who have yet to recover.
“These people need to be found and honored,” said Al-Shaghnobi, a rescuer. “This job is waiting for us. All we need is the equipment and we will do it.”
Muath Al-Khatib and Amr Ahmad Tabash contributed to this report.
