The Gaza Strip is a vast landscape of destruction.
Beneath the jagged remnants, bodies remain trapped.
From Gaza City in the north to Rafah in the south, entire neighborhoods that once bustled with life now lie in ruin.
Since the ceasefire with Israel began a week ago, Palestinians returning to their communities are finding only fragments of their former lives. Many are also searching desperately for their missing loved ones.
Ali Suleiman, a merchant from Khan Younis, last saw his teenage son nine months ago.
Suleiman has spent this week searching for him in hospitals, on the streets and under the rubble, where many bodies are being recovered.
“I’ll know him immediately through his clothes, even if he is a skeleton,” Suleiman said.
Ahmed Radwan, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defense, said his team recovered about 150 bodies from the rubble in various neighborhoods of Rafah. The bodies are so decomposed that they are hard to identify, he explained.
There are still more to find, he said in a video interview, but his team needs heavy equipment and fuel to move the rubble. For now, the work continues with basic tools and their hands.---
Gaza City
Abeer Barakat, 44, already knew there was nothing left of her home.
“I will go collect some items from the dirt where my house once stood this week, but first, we have to focus on more urgent matters,” Barakat told The Washington Post via WhatsApp.
The most urgent was collecting the bodies of six members of her husband’s family who had yet to receive a proper burial. Before the ceasefire, she said, Gazans could only bury their dead in shallow makeshift graves, wherever they could find an open space. The intensity of the Israeli strikes made it nearly impossible to get to a cemetery.
The temporary graves had not been deep enough to protect the remains from the elements or stray hungry dogs, she said.
Proper graves are hard to come by, with so many families in need of them. After the fighting stopped, Barakat’s husband’s family rented a truck and collected the bodies from three separate neighborhoods and buried them two to a grave.
“We have no time to grieve,” she said. “We need to keep working.”
Beit Lahia, Gaza
Raghad Hamouda, 17, said the road back to her neighborhood was strewn with “the bodies of men and women and blood.”
Hamouda, the oldest of seven children, was born in Beit Lahia, north of Gaza City. She said her grandmother was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December; her father and one of her brothers were injured a month later by gunfire.
As their situation grew increasingly dire, Hamouda said they were forced to flee to Gaza City’s Rimal neighborhood.
Her family walked four hours to where their home had once stood. In its place, concrete blocks and twisted metal protruded from the ground.
Picking through her tattered clothing inside the rubble was difficult, she said. She found nothing she could salvage.
“I stood up, looked at things and sat down crying, thinking about how my country and my relatives’ homes had reached this state,” she said via WhatsApp. “Everything had turned into ash.”
Hamouda returned to the site the next morning and unearthed her high school diploma. She stored it at her grandmother’s house nearby for safekeeping. She and her family will now live in a tent near their old home.
“It seems I will be living in a tent for a long time,” she said.- - -
Rafah
On Sunday, hours after the ceasefire, Ruba Za’arub, 22, went to see the place where her family home once stood in Rafah. She immediately regretted it.
While she made her way through the neighborhood, Za’arub said she saw “a number of skulls” and screamed.
She witnessed a man holding skeletal remains, refusing to accept they belonged to his father.
Za’arub said the neighborhood where she grew up was unrecognizable.
“I reached what I knew was our home, but because of the severity of the destruction there, I became confused,” Za’arub said via WhatsApp.
She then started to spot some personal belongings, like an old portrait, but there was not much else to retrieve from the home she had evacuated nine months ago, she said.
Za’arub is hearing-impaired. Before she was displaced to Khan Younis, she said she loved to convert songs into sign language for her deaf and mute friends. Her family had dedicated a corner in their home to showcase her drawings and awards she had received over the years. Now all that was gone, she said.
“I wish I could sit in my room and feel safe even for a moment,” she said.
- Washington Post