Special correspondent
Everything gets mixed up. Children’s backpack in several colors. Running shoe. Steel pot pierced by shrapnel. Parts of beds, chairs, stoves, lampshades; glass of broken windows, mirrors, drinking glasses. Clothes scraps.
These last shredded, dust-covered objects may be markers. They often belong to the dead lying near the surface of the ruins.
“Since the Israeli occupation forces withdrew from Rafah, we have received about 150 calls from civilians about the presence of the bodies of their relatives under the houses,” says Haitham al-Homs, director of the Civil Defense Agency’s Ambulance and Ambulance Service in Rafah. at the southernmost end of the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian health authorities estimate that 10,000 people are missing. Where there are no visible features such as clothing on the surface, search teams rely on information from relatives and neighbors or follow the smell of death emanating from the rubble.
WARNING: This story contains disturbing content
The Israeli government has banned the BBC and other international news organizations from entering Gaza and reporting independently. We depend on reliable local journalists who record the experiences of people like those searching for the missing.
At the end of each day, Mr. Homs updates the list of those found. His team carefully excavates the ruins, aware that they are searching for fragments of broken humanity. Often what is found is nothing more than a pile of bones. Israeli high-explosive bombs blew up and dismembered many of the dead. The bones and pieces of clothing are placed in white body bags on which Mr. Homs writes the Arabic word “majhoul.” It means “unidentified”.
Rafah resident Osama Saleh returned to his home after the ceasefire and found a skeleton inside. The skull was fractured. Mr. Saleh believes that the body lay there for four to five months. “We are people with feelings… I can’t tell you how miserable the tragedy is,” he says. Being surrounded every day by the smell of decomposing bodies is a deeply disturbing experience, as those who have witnessed the aftermath of mass death will often testify.
“The bodies are terrifying. We are watching horror,” says Osama Saleh. “I swear it’s a painful feeling, I was crying.”
Families are also arriving at hospitals in search of remains. In the yard of the European Hospital in southern Gaza, collections of bones and clothing are spread over body bags.
Abdul Salam al-Mughayer, 19, from Rafah, disappeared in the Shabour area; according to his uncle Zaki, it was a place you never came back from if you went there during the war. “So we didn’t go there to look for him for that reason. We wouldn’t go back.”
Zaki believes that the pile of bones and clothes in front of him belong to the missing Abdul Salam. He stands with a hospital worker, Jihad Abu Khreis, waiting for Abdul Salam’s brother to arrive.
“It is 99% certain that the body is his,” says Mr. Abu Khreis, “but now we need final confirmation from his brother, the people closest to him, to make sure the pants and shoes are his.”
Soon after, the brother arrived from the al-Mawasi tent refugee camp, also in southern Gaza. He had a photo of Abdul Salam on his phone. There was a photo of his sneakers.
He knelt in front of the body bag and pulled back the covers. He touched the skull, the clothes. He saw the shoes. There were tears in his eyes. The identification was complete.
Another family moved along the line of body bags. There was a grandmother, her son, an adult sister and a small child. The child was held at the back of the group while the old woman and her son looked under the lid of the body bag. They looked at each other for a few seconds and then hugged each other mournfully.
After that, the family took away the remains with the help of the hospital staff. They cried, but no one cried loudly.
Aya al-Dabeh was 13 years old and lived with her family and hundreds of other refugees at a school in Tal al-Hawa, in the northern city of Gaza. She was one of nine children. One day at the beginning of the war, Aya went to the toilet on the school floor and – according to her family – an Israeli sniper shot her in the chest. The Israel Defense Forces say they do not target civilians and blame Hamas for attacks from civilian areas. During the war, the UN Human Rights Office said there was “intense shelling by Israeli forces in densely populated areas resulting in apparently unlawful killings, including of unarmed bystanders.”
The family buried Aya next to the school, and her mother Lina al-Dabah, 43, wrapped her in a blanket “to protect her from the rain and sun” in case the grave was disturbed and exposed to the elements.
When the Israeli army took over the school, Lina fled to the south. She left with four other children – two daughters and two sons – to be reunited with her husband who had left earlier with the couple’s other children. Lina had no choice but to leave her daughter where she lay, hoping to return and find the remains for a proper burial when peace came.
“Aya was a very kind girl and everyone loved her. Before, she loved everyone, her teachers and her studies, she was very good at school. She wished everyone well,” says Lina. When there was a ceasefire, Lina asked relatives still living in the north to check on Aya’s grave. The news was devastating.
“They told us that her head was in one place, her legs in another, and her ribs in another place. The one who went to visit her was shocked and sent us pictures,” he says.
“When I saw her, I couldn’t understand how my daughter was pulled out of the grave and eaten by dogs? I can’t control my nerves.”
Relatives have collected the bones and soon Lina and her family will travel north to transfer Aya’s remains to a proper grave. For Lina, there is an endless sadness and an unanswered question – the same question that many parents who have lost children face in Gaza. What could they have done differently in such wartime circumstances? – I couldn’t take her from the place where she was buried – says Lina. Then he asks, “Where could I have taken her?”
With additional reporting by Malak Hassouneh, Alice Doyard, Adam Campbell.
