GAZA: Guns may have fallen silent in Gaza, but for Mahmoud Abu Dalfa, the agony is not over.
Dalfa is desperately searching for the bodies of his wife and five children trapped under the rubble of his house since the early months of the war.
Abu Dalfa’s wife and children were among 35 of his extended family who were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit the building in Gaza City’s Shejaia suburb in December 2023, he said. As bombs continued to fall, only three bodies were retrieved.
“My children are still under the rubble. I am trying to get them out… The civil defence 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,” Abu Dalfa told Reuters.
“My wife was killed along with all my five children – three daughters and two sons. I had triplets,” he said.
Burials are usually carried out within a few hours of death in Muslim and Arab communities, and failure to retrieve bodies and ensure dignified burials is agonizing for bereaved families.
“I hope I can bring them out and make them a grave. That’s all I want from this entire 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 get them out and make them a grave,” said Abu Dalfa.
The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service and medical staff have recovered around 200 bodies since the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel came into effect on Sunday, halting a 15-month conflict that has killed more than 47,000 Gazans.
The war in Gaza was triggered when Palestinian Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 as hostages, according to Israeli tallies. At least 94 of those hostages remain in Gaza.
Mahmoud Basal, the head of the service, said extraction operations have been challenged by the lack of earth-moving and heavy machinery, adding that Israel had destroyed several of their vehicles and killed at least 100 of their staff.–Reuters
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