[News] Palestinians in Gaza Struggle to Retrieve Their Dead With Little More Than Hammers
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Oct 22 11:25:27 EDT 2025
As the world focuses on the bodies of Israeli captives, thousands of
Palestinians are missing and buried under the rubble.
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Palestinians in Gaza Struggle to Retrieve Their Dead With Little More
Than Hammers
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As the world focuses on the bodies of Israeli captives, thousands
of Palestinians are missing and buried under the rubble.
Abdel Qader Sabbah <https://substack.com/@abdelqadersabbah>
Oct 21, 2025
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<https://substack.com/redirect/aa05a2bf-3f27-4d97-8e20-525abf4fc90c?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>Vivian
Al-Har, a Palestinian woman whose son remains under the rubble of her
house after an Israeli airstrike killed her entire family, sits in a
destroyed cemetery in Gaza City. October 20, 2025. (Screenshot of video
by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)
GAZA CITY—After an Israeli airstrike on Vivian Al-Har’s home killed her
entire family barely two weeks before the ceasefire went into effect
during Israel’s concentrated military offensive on Gaza City, the
disfigured and dismembered bodies of her husband, four daughters, son,
and brother-in-law were pulled out of the ruins and buried. Her older
son’s body remains trapped under the rubble.
“I am left alone, I am the only one remaining in the family. I have no
sons, no daughters, no husband, no one,” Al-Har told Drop Site, weeping
as she spoke. “There is no equipment. All the floors collapsed on my
son; there were no tools and no one able to get him out. My son and my
neighbor’s son are in the same house, and no one can reach them. As much
as we tried to appeal to civil defense, there are no services. There is
nothing in Gaza.”
An estimated 10,000 Palestinians killed by Israel remain buried under
the rubble, according to Gaza’s Civil Defense, with Israel preventing
the resources and equipment required to retrieve them. Among those
bodies are a handful of Israeli captives killed in the war that have
been the focus of the international media and U.S. and Israeli officials
as part of the ceasefire agreement.
“It is a focus of everybody here to get those bodies back home to their
families so they can have a proper burial,” U.S. Vice President JD Vance
said at a press conference in Israel on Tuesday. “That said, this is
difficult. This is not going to happen overnight. Some of these hostages
are buried under thousands of pounds of rubble, some of the hostages
nobody even knows where they are.” Vance did not mention the thousands
of Palestinians also lying under the rubble. Nor did he mention the
bodies of Palestinians buried in cemeteries that were bulldozed and
destroyed by the Israeli military.
<https://substack.com/redirect/b80b7654-7582-4bfd-9b21-317a1a00aedd?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>
/Vivian Al-Har at a cemetery in Gaza City located opposite the Al-Ahli
Baptist Hospital that was destroyed by Israeli forces. (Video by Abdel
Qader Sabbah.)/
Al-Har said when she came to the cemetery opposite the Al-Ahli Baptist
Hospital where the rest of her family is buried, she could hardly
recognize it. “I came here to see my [other] son. I buried my son but I
don’t know where he is. I kept searching,” Al-Har said. Around her, the
graveyard was decimated, covered in broken tombstones and torn up earth.
“Everyone came and no one knew where their child’s grave was. The
remains are torn and people are dismembered and no one knows their
child’s grave,” she said. “The dead are tormented and the living are
tormented.”
Since the ceasefire went into effect, a total of 432 bodies have been
retrieved across Gaza, according to the ministry of health.
“The issue of the missing persons under the rubble and retrieving the
bodies of the martyrs is a very difficult and complex issue. This
particular file is one of the most challenging tasks currently facing
the Civil Defense,” Mahmoud Bassal, the spokesperson for Civil Defense
told Drop Site. “We’re talking about 71,000 tons of waste scattered in
different areas of the Gaza Strip,” he said. “The issue of heavy
equipment is now a critical and very important matter to manage this, as
well as the need for specialists, experts with the necessary skills and
abilities to enter Gaza to assist the Civil Defense teams in carrying
out this extremely difficult humanitarian task…If the situation remains
as it is, under these current conditions, we will not be able to carry
out retrieval operations. Even if there were a few pieces of heavy
equipment, it would still take a long time to retrieve the bodies from
under the rubble.”
In Gaza City on Monday, crowds in different neighborhoods gathered on
large piles of rubble to try and break up huge slabs of broken concrete
using little more than hammers in a search for the dead. One bloodied
corpse was retrieved and carried in a blanket to a waiting ambulance.
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/Palestinians in Gaza City try to dig bodies out from under the rubble.
October 20, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)/
“This is an issue that truly shocked us—the double standards in the
immense attention given by international organizations to search for the
bodies of Israeli prisoners, while, in fact, there are 10,000
Palestinians missing under the rubble,” Bassal said. “This is a human
being, and that is also a human being, both have the right to be buried
in a humane way. But the Israeli occupation, it seems without a doubt,
and the international system, too, have a problem with understanding
that and with the concept of humanity.”
There are also an unknown number of Palestinians in Gaza who are simply
missing, their families unaware whether they were killed or abducted by
the Israeli military and imprisoned.
Amina Salem Abu Mousa’s 16-year-old son, Obeida, disappeared on May 29,
when he went to a so-called aid distribution center run by the Gaza
Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) near the Netzarim Corridor just south of
Wadi Gaza and never returned.
“I haven’t heard anything, and no one has told me anything about him. I
don’t know if he died, was martyred, imprisoned, arrested, or if he got
shot and the dogs ate him. I don’t know. I just want someone to tell me
something about him,” Abu Mousa told Drop Site. Over 2,600 Palestinians
were killed by Israeli troops and American mercenaries at or near aid
sites or truck convoys since the GHF began operating in Gaza in May. “He
went because they said there would be aid, aid distribution. So, he took
his ID and came to bring us the aid. We were starving, we didn’t have
flour, we didn’t have food. Everything was closed, all the places were
closed. There was nothing to eat, nothing at all,” she said. “He came,
just like the others, like the young men, like the women, like the
others who went. His brothers came back, and his neighbors came back,
but he didn’t return. He still hasn’t returned.”
Since the ceasefire went into effect earlier this month and the GHF
sites dismantled, Abu Mousa has been coming to the dusty Netzarim site
every day to look for her son. “I come here just to see and smell his
scent. To know where he is. I want someone to reassure me. He was the
one who kept me company at home, helped me, brought me everything. I
felt like the house was empty without him. My house feels empty without
him,” she said. “There are eyewitnesses who said he was injured and the
army took him. I want to know if the army took him and where they took
him. Did they bury him? Did they detain him? I need to know. It is my
right to know where my son is.”
<https://substack.com/redirect/2edd5e58-184f-4b18-9d66-a819697f7839?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>
/Amina Salem Abu Mousa at a former GHF site near the Netzarim corridor
where her son disappeared. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)/
Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians from Gaza and the West
Bank over the past two years, doubling the Palestinian prison population
to over 11,000. As part of the ceasefire agreement, nearly 2,000
Palestinian captives—1,700 of them from Gaza—were released earlier this
month in an exchange for the remaining 20 living Israeli captives.
Israel has also returned the bodies of 165 Palestinians, according to
the health ministry, in exchange for the bodies of dead Israeli
captives. Some of the bodies bore signs of torture and execution, with
their hands and feet still bound or eyes blindfolded. The bodies were
sent back to Gaza with numbers instead of names, forcing the health
ministry to publish photos of the decomposed corpses online for families
to try and identify their loved ones. Only around two dozen have been
identified so far. At least 135 of the bodies had been held in Sde
Neiman, a prison camp in the Negev desert notorious for extreme abuse
and torture of detainees, health officials told the Guardian. Leaked
photos and testimonies from the site showed Palestinian detainees being
held in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds and
forced to wear diapers.
“This is how the bodies of Gaza’s prisoners were returned—blindfolded,
bound like animals, and bearing signs of severe torture and burning,”
Dr. Munir al-Bursh, director-general of the Health Ministry, wrote on
social media. “They did not die naturally—they were executed while
restrained, a war crime demanding an urgent international investigation
and accountability for the perpetrators.”
/Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report./
A guest post by
Abdel Qader Sabbah
<https://substack.com/@abdelqadersabbah?utm_campaign=guest_post_bio&utm_medium=email>
journalist and videographer in northern Gaza
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