The guns may have fallen silent in Gaza, but for Mahmoud Abu Dalfa, the agony is not over. He desperately searches for the bodies of his wife and five children trapped under the rubble of his house.
Abu Dalfa’s wife and children were among 35 members of his extended family killed when an Israeli airstrike hit a building in the Gaza suburb of Shuja’iyya in December 2023, he said.
As the bombs continued to fall, only three bodies were recovered.
– My children are still under the ruins. I’m trying to get them out. Civil protection came, they tried, but the destruction makes it difficult. We don’t have the equipment here to extract martyrs. We need excavators and a lot of technical tools – said Abu Dalfa.
– My wife and all five of my children – three daughters and two sons – were killed. I had triplets – he said.
Burials are usually carried out within hours of death in Muslim and Arab communities, and the failure to exhume bodies and provide dignified burials is painful for bereaved families.
– I hope I will be able to take them out and make a grave for them. That’s all I want from the whole world. I don’t want them to build me a house or give me anything else. All I want is a grave for them to pull them out and make a grave for them – said Abu Dalfa.
Palestinian civilian emergency services and medical personnel have recovered about 200 bodies since a truce between Hamas and Israel took effect on Sunday, ending a 15-month bombing campaign by the occupying state that has killed more than 47,000 Gazans.
Mahmoud Basal, head of the service, said recovery operations were hampered by a lack of earthmoving and heavy machinery, adding that Israel had destroyed several of their vehicles and killed at least 100 personnel.
Basal estimates that the bodies of around 10,000 Palestinians killed in the war have not yet been found and buried.
A UN damage assessment released this month found that clearing the more than 50 million tons of rubble left behind by Israeli bombing could take 21 years and cost up to $1.2 billion, Reuters reports.
(Vijesti.ba / FENA)
