After 15 months of war, Hani al-Dibs, a high schoolteacher, thought his greatest wish was to see the bombardment of the Gaza Strip come to an end. But the long-awaited ceasefire has brought only bitterness and dread.
Al-Dibs is one of countless Palestinians burdened with an agonising duty: trying to recover the remains of loved ones trapped beneath the swathes of rubble left by Israel’s war against Hamas.
Some families have returned home to find corpses of loved ones so decomposed, they cannot tell them apart. Others cannot even enter the wreckage to dig, so strong is the stench of human decay. And some have searched and searched, only to find nothing at all.
As they prepared to return to their hometown, Jabalia, in northern Gaza, al-Dibs’s two surviving children kept asking him whether their mother and little brothers might somehow have survived the blast that had trapped their bodies for three months beneath the rubble of the family home.
“They’d ask: What if they were still sleeping after the explosion and climbed out later? What if, later on, the Israelis heard them screaming and got them out?” he said in an interview. “Their questions torment me.”
Gaza’s health authorities have tallied nearly 48,000 among the dead, without distinguishing between civilians and combatants.
Beyond that is an untold toll: those whose bodies have yet to be found.
Families have reported 9,000 people as missing and presumed dead under rubble. Most of those have yet to be unearthed from Gaza’s ruins, health officials said. Several thousand of these are still not counted among the dead, as authorities investigate the backlog of requests.
In mid-October, amid heavy clashes with Hamas, al-Dibs said Israeli forces blew up the building that housed three generations of the Dibs family.
Desperate to seek medical help for family members dug out from the rubble, al-Dibs was forced into a terrible choice: He had to leave behind his wife, his two youngest children, his mother, his sisters and his nieces – 14 loved ones in all – beneath the ruins. As the Dibs family survivors fled south to safety, he vowed to return for their bodies. It was a pledge that took months to fulfil.
For weeks after he fled, al-Dibs filed repeated requests to Israel to reach the site, using a process the UN set up to try to co-ordinate with Israel to allow Gaza’s rescuers access to blast sites. Israel denied all of the Dibs family’s requests, the UN said.
Cogat, the Israeli military body that handles co-ordination with humanitarian organisations in Gaza, did not respond to a written request for comment.
Nearly three months later, as the ceasefire began, al-Dibs and his children finally set off for home on foot, picking their way over mounds of rubble and debris.
What they found was worse than they had imagined. Bombings had levelled buildings, scattering piles of rocks on top of his family’s collapsed home.
Relatives arrived, eager to help. But with Israel’s punishing siege still blocking new equipment from entering the enclave, no one had drills or other power tools to break through the rubble.
“We used what we could find: shovels, picks and our bare hands,” he said.
After hours of digging, they finally reached the flattened floor where his family had lived.
Al-Dibs found parts of a skeleton that he believed belonged to his son Hasib, who was eight. But he could find nothing of his wife and six-year-old Habib – only a few charred fragments of bone that crumbled as he tried to grasp them between his fingers.
An Al Jazeera television segment filming retrieval efforts in the neighbourhood caught on camera al-Dib’s realisation that he would never find their bodies. Trembling with fury, he shook out some white plastic body bags.
“I brought big shrouds! And little shrouds! So I could put their bodies inside! But I found their bodies reduced to ashes!” he screamed.
Then, as his 12-year-old daughter Fatima, in a bright yellow jacket, ran up to the ruins, sobbing and calling out the names of her younger brothers, al-Dibs gently pulled her away: “Oh, Habib! Oh, Hasib! Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God!”
“They were deprived of a last goodbye,” al-Dibs said.
The family has since buried Hasib’s remains, and now his daughter has new questions.
“She keeps asking why we can’t have graves for her mother and Habib. Where will she go sit and confide in her mother, without a grave?”
Those who find their loved ones’ bodies face other psychological torments.
Ahmad Shbat (25) found some of his relatives’ bodies in the northern town of Beit Hanoun completely intact, leaving him agonising over the question of whether they had died not from the bombing, but from prolonged suffering as they awaited a rescue that never came.
“The feeling of helplessness,” he said, “is overwhelming.”
Since the ceasefire, medical workers have been called to retrieve dozens of unidentified bodies, said Saleh al-Homs, deputy director of the European Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis.
They write the location and any identifying details on the body bags and place inside any belongings they find, he said, then take them to the closest hospital morgue and post descriptions of their findings on social media.
Gaza’s emergency rescue service, the Civil Defence, has pleaded with residents not to attempt retrievals on their own, warning of the potential for bombs or unexploded ordnance beneath the wreckage. It says it cannot conduct major excavation efforts until heavy equipment, such as diggers, are allowed into Gaza – which Israel says it will not permit.
But few Palestinians, like Ramy Nasr, a trader from Jabalia, have any intention of waiting on anyone for help.
Nasr returned to the site of the explosion last October that brought down the building where his siblings and their families had been sheltering.
He paid $500 to construction workers to drill a tunnel into the building to retrieve them. The bodies he found were so decomposed, he said, it was hard to tell them apart.
Eventually, he was able to sort them into two piles.
The remains of what he believed to be his brother Ammar Adel Nasr; his wife, Imtiyaz; and their two daughters went into one grave. His brother Aref and sister Ola went into another.
Like so many graveyards in Gaza, he said, his family’s graveyard is now so crammed with new bodies, it has become difficult to secure plots.
“Before the war, every person was put into their own grave,” he said. “These days, there isn’t enough room – or time.” − This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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