African News Agency : Welcome

975 days later, Gaza families are still digging for their dead after Israeli strikes

Lulu Herz was a 23-year-old translator. She got married exactly one day before Israel's genocide began on October 6, 2023.

The next morning, she fled with her husband from the Al-Sahaba area in central Gaza to Tal al-Hawa, in western Gaza City, where they took shelter with his relatives, the Karam family.

On December 18, 2023, an airstrike hit the four-storey building where roughly 50 people were staying. Twenty-five of them were killed, including Lulu, her 26-year-old husband, and his brother. A few survivors sheltering in the basement dug themselves out with their bare hands. Lulu and her husband remained under the rubble.

Monzer, displaced separately in the south of the Strip at the time, learned of his sister's death before the rest of the family did. He told The New Arab that communications had collapsed, and it took him two days to pass on the news. He tried to arrange the recovery of her body himself, at his own expense.

"I tried to recover the body myself, but it needed coordination with COGAT, and I couldn't get it," he said, referring to the Israeli military unit responsible for civilian coordination in the Palestinian territories.

Four days before Monzer spoke to The New Arab, recovery teams finally reached the site. But what came up was not a body he could recognise; it was a mangled mass of bone and tissue, mixed together with the remains of others who had died in the same building.

"When it came up, we didn't know if it was her. We pulled out a pile of bones, and the remains had mixed together. We couldn't confirm this was hers," he said.

With no way to separate Lulu's remains from the rest, the family agreed to have them folded into a single funeral for everyone pulled from that address. "We treated it as a mass funeral, and buried them in a mass grave," Monzer told The New Arab.

Gaza's Civil Defence has estimated that around 8,000 Palestinians remain under collapsed buildings, while other rights monitors have suggested the true figure, including the unrecovered and unidentified, could run considerably higher.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defence, told The New Arab that teams have so far recovered 200 bodies since operations resumed in late June, and that roughly 300 buildings across the Strip are still believed to contain victims.

"This is one of the hardest tasks facing our field teams in Gaza," he said, describing a recovery effort that, by his own count, has years of work left.

A first phase, he said, run with the ICRC from last November through February, recovered 333 bodies across central Gaza, Gaza City and the north, over roughly 800 hours of labour, before the project was suspended for seven months.

Dr Ahmed Abu Taha, who heads the unidentified remains file at Gaza's forensic evidence department, told The New Arab that the scale of the crisis dwarfs the teams' capacity, with no more than 15 people, including volunteers, on staff.

Everything related to identifying victims faces restrictions on entry into Gaza, Dr Ahmed said, making the task harder with every year that passes.

"We have the confirmatory tests needed for identification — forensic anthropology, bone analysis, dental exams, and DNA testing, the most well-known. None of these are available in the Gaza Strip."

On August 20, one was dug in Gaza City for 50 people from the Al-Sawafiri, Al-Batniji, Karam, Herz and other families. Their bodies had just been retrieved from the ruins of homes hit in the early months of Israel's genocide, in neighbourhoods including Tal al-Hawa, Zeitoun, Sabra, Sheikh Radwan and al-Shati.

Weeks earlier was an even larger funeral, on August 4, when thousands gathered in Gaza City to bury 112 members of the Abu Sharia and al-Hasayna families, with remains recovered from a single building in the Sabra neighbourhood hit in November 2023, in what Gaza’s Civil Defence called one of the largest funerals held in the territory since Israel's war on the besieged enclave began.

Palestinian officials say that the strike alone killed 308 members of the two families, including 40 children. Around 157 of them remain unaccounted for.

Ihab al-Sawafiri, 56, lost most of his family on December 2, 2023, the second day of the war's first truce. He and his brother had gone to visit a wounded friend at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital when a strike hit nearby. He saw smoke rising from roughly the direction of his own neighbourhood, Asqoula, and ran home to find the building collapsed and on fire.

Twenty-seven of his relatives and around 41 neighbours had been inside. In the days that followed, he found his eldest son’s body in the building across the street, his wife's on the ground, and his younger son on a neighbour's roof. The rest of his family, including two more children aged 20 and nine, stayed buried under the rubble for nearly three years.

By the time recovery teams reached them, Ihab told The New Arab that identification was nearly impossible. Twelve bodies pulled out on the first day were buried in open ground and later bulldozed over, leaving no trace.

"It's impossible to identify the remains. It's been almost three years under the rubble," he said. "Our psychological state is very bad. For almost three years, we've been asking Civil Defence to pull the bodies from the rubble.”

Excavation proceeds with heavy equipment supplied by the International Committee of the Red Cross, while Civil Defence crews work alongside forensic and criminal-evidence specialists to sort and count remains, Mahmoud said.

This is entirely new work for Gaza's forensic teams. "Before the war, the issue of bodies and missing people under the rubble didn’t exist — there was no foundation for this kind of work," Dr Ahmed said.

Nada Abu Aita, director of the Palestinian Centre for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons, told The New Arab that people like Lulu Herz occupy an awkward legal space. Even when a family knows exactly where a relative died and believes the body is still under a specific building, that person is classified as "missing" under the law.

"Legally, they're classified as missing, even though the family knows where they are and that they were killed in a specific strike," she said.

"Their fate isn't settled until the body is extracted, a death certificate issued, burial carried out, and the family's doubt fully removed."

Nada said many such families never file a formal missing-persons case at all, since they already know where their relative is. Instead, they push the Civil Defence and the Red Cross to recover the body directly. The centre can't put a firm number on how many people remain under Gaza's rubble.

"There's no way to give an exact figure for the people still under the rubble. These are estimates. They could be a bit higher or a bit lower, and we try our best to put out a reasonable number," she said.

Some of the missing, she added, were never inside a building at all: killed in the street, buried informally by strangers, or possibly buried by the Israeli army, with no record left behind.

Beyond staffing, forensic teams lack vehicles, equipment, and basic logistics, even though specialists are meant to be present the moment remains are retrieved.

"Forensic staff need to be present at retrieval to properly document the remains," Dr Ahmed said. This is especially critical when remains are decomposed or mixed together.

When teams reach a strike site, Dr Ahmed said, they begin by reconstructing what happened before identification starts. They determine the circumstances and narrow down who was present to link the recovered remains to the people who once lived there.

"Before we start work, we take statements, whether from a survivor or from neighbours, to reach the spot where the family was located before the strike, so it’s easier for us to find the remains," he added.

Not every site can be worked, Mahmoud said. Some buildings are at risk of collapse or sit near structures already unstable, ruling out the use of heavy machinery.

Unexploded ordnance is also a recurring hazard, and crews handle decomposed remains with almost no personal protective equipment — no proper suits, boots or masks.

"We're putting them at risk this way, while the crews get paid $300 every 100 days. It's a wage that's barely worth mentioning," he said.

Nada said the longer bodies stay buried, the more forensic evidence degrades and the harder it becomes to legally close a case — for a widow trying to remarry, an orphaned child needing a guardian, or an inheritance that cannot be settled without a death certificate.

She said that documenting where the missing lie is not only a humanitarian duty but also potential evidence for future accountability efforts.

"If the documentation of these sites, the names of the missing, and the remains are done through joint work between rights organisations and state institutions, it should serve as an official record of these crimes, for use in future prosecutions," she added.

The second ceasefire in effect since October 2025 has not stopped Israeli strikes, nor has it resolved who is responsible for funding and equipping the recovery of Gaza's dead, or how identification is meant to proceed without a functioning health system or forensic infrastructure.

The lack of heavy machinery, including equipment destroyed in Israeli strikes, has repeatedly stalled recovery efforts for the thousands of bodies believed to remain under Gaza's rubble, according to the UN.

For thousands of families like the Herzes and the Al-Sawafiris, the question remains whether there will ever be a body to name, or only a shared grave and a date circled on a calendar — the day, after years of asking, that someone finally came to dig.

Ansam Al-Kitaa is a freelance journalist based in Gaza. For years, she has covered the successive wars in Gaza and their humanitarian and social impacts for international and local outlets

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab board or staff or CEMAS Editorial Team. - (ANA) -