‘My daughter’s bones were scattered on the ground’

Everything mixes. The child’s multicolored backpack. A running shoe. A steel pot pierced by shrapnel. Pieces of beds, chairs, stoves, lampshades; the broken window panes, the mirrors, the glasses. Remains of clothing.

These last crushed and dust-covered items can be markers. They often belong to the dead lying near the surface of the rubble.

“Since the Israeli occupation forces withdrew from Rafah, we have received around 150 calls from civilians about the presence of their relatives’ bodies under houses,” says Haitham al-Homs, director of Emergency and Ambulance Services. of the Civil Defense agency in Rafah. in the southern tip of the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian health authorities estimate that 10,000 people are missing. When there are no visible signs on the surface, such as clothing, search teams rely on information from relatives and neighbors, or follow the smell of death radiating from the ruins.

WARNING: This story contains distressing content.

The Israeli government has banned the BBC and other international news organizations from entering Gaza and reporting independently. We rely on trusted local journalists to record the experiences of people like those searching for the missing.

At the end of each day, Homs updates the list of those found. His team carefully excavates the rubble, knowing that they are searching for fragments of shattered humanity. Often what is recovered is nothing more than a pile of bones. Israel’s high-explosive bombs ripped and mangled many of the dead. The bones and pieces of clothing are placed in white body bags on which Homs writes the Arabic word “majhoul.” It means “unidentified.”

A resident of Rafah, Osama Saleh, returned to his house after the ceasefire and found a skeleton inside. The skull was fractured. Saleh estimates that the body remained there for four or five months. “We are humans with feelings… I can’t convey to 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 deaths will often testify.

“The bodies are terrifying. We are seeing terror,” says Osama Saleh. “I swear it’s a painful feeling, I’ve cried.”

Families have also arrived at hospitals in search of remains. In the courtyard of the European Hospital in southern Gaza, collections of bones and clothing are scattered in body bags.

Abdul Salam al-Mughayer, 19, from Rafah, disappeared in the Shaboura area; According to his uncle Zaki, it was a place you didn’t come back from if you went there during the war. “So we didn’t go looking for him there for that reason. We wouldn’t have come back.”

Zaki believes that a set of bones and clothes in front of him belong to the missing Abdul Salam. He is with a hospital worker, Jihad Abu Khreis, waiting for Abdul Salam’s brother to arrive.

“It’s 99% sure the body is his,” says 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.”

Shortly after, the brother arrived from the al-Mawasi refugee camp, also in southern Gaza. He had a photograph of Abdul Salam on his phone. There was a photo of his running shoes.

He knelt before the body bag and removed the lid. He touched the skull, the clothes. He saw the shoes. There were tears in her eyes. The identification was complete.

Another family moved through the row of body bags. There was a grandmother, her son, an adult sister, and a little boy. The boy was kept at the back of the group while the old woman and her son looked under the lid of the body bag. They stared at each other for a few seconds and then hugged each other in pain.

After this, the family, helped by hospital workers, took away the remains. They were crying, but no one was shouting out loud.

Aya al-Dabeh was 13 years old and lived with her family and hundreds of other refugees in a school in Tal al-Hawa, in northern Gaza City. She was one of nine children. One day at the beginning of the war, Aya went to the school’s upstairs bathroom and, her family says, an Israeli sniper shot her in the chest. The Israel Defense Forces say they do not attack civilians and blame Hamas for attacking from civilian areas. During the war, the UN Human Rights Office said there was “intense shooting by Israeli forces in densely populated areas that resulted 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 control of the school, Lina fled south. She went with four other children (two daughters and two sons) to join her husband, who had gone earlier with the couple’s other children. Lina had no choice but to leave her daughter where she lay, hoping to return and retrieve the remains for a proper burial once peace came.

“Aya was a very kind girl and everyone loved her. She loved everyone, her teachers and her studies, and she was very good at school. She wanted the best for everyone,” says Lina. When the ceasefire came, Lina asked relatives still living in the north to check Aya’s grave. The news was devastating.

“They informed us that her head was in one place, her legs in another, while her ribs were in another place. The person who went to visit her was shocked and sent us the photos,” he says.

“When I saw it, I couldn’t understand how they took my daughter out of her grave and how the dogs ate her. I can’t control my nerves.”

Relatives have collected the bones and soon Lina and her family will travel north to take Aya’s remains to a suitable grave. For Lina, there is endless pain and a question that has no answer: the same question asked by so many parents who lost their children in Gaza. What could they have done differently, the circumstances of the war being what they were? “I couldn’t get her out of where she was buried,” says Lina. He then asks, “Where could I have taken her?”

With additional reporting by Malak Hassouneh, Alice Doyard and Adam Campbell.