With the ceasefire in Gaza comes a gruesome challenge: Counting and collecting the dead

Palestinians search through the rubble left by the Israeli air and ground offensive against Hamas in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — The corpses keep coming every day, sometimes dozens at a time, brought to morgues in the Gaza Strip after being pried from under 15 months of rubble and pulled from battle zones long too dangerous for search-and-rescue teams to reach.

These bodies, dug up as a ceasefire took hold this week, are Gaza’s “missing,” the uncounted dead haunting families scattered by the war. For the Gaza Health Ministry, they were reduced to a bullet-point caveat beneath every daily death toll: “A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the streets, and cannot be accessed.”

On Sunday, as a deal between Israel and Hamas paused the deadliest war in a century of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, families across the enclave scrambled to reunite with their loved ones — the living, the dead and the missing.

Palestinians crowded the ruins that were once their homes, watching anxiously as civil defense teams hacked at the rubble in search of missing bodies. Each day of the ceasefire, the ministry has logged 50 to 120 recovered corpses.

“From the moment the truce began, we were searching and searching,” said Samira Alshaar, 58, who returned Sunday to the house she fled nine months earlier when the southern city of Rafah came under attack. She watched as her son, Ibrahim Qeshta, was killed by an airstrike before he could escape with her.

“We left our son behind,” she said.

Ibrahim’s younger brother, Abdullah Qeshta, clawed Wednesday with his bare hands through blasted concrete and twisted rebar, his face shining with sweat and smeared with the dust of his family’s life together. For three days, running on adrenaline, and anguish, he and the civil defense workers said they took breaks only to perform daily prayers and to sleep.

Alshaar, looking on, said she felt herself losing hope.

But suddenly, the men began to shout. They heaved stones and shards of concrete to the side.

In the dirt were ragged pieces of 37-year-old Ibrahim’s navy blue pajamas, the ones he was wearing on May 6, 2024, when Israeli airstrikes sent everyone running. Ibrahim was running in the opposite direction, shouting to his mother that he’d be back in a second and was grabbing blankets inside. Then the house was struck, the walls collapsing onto him.

“That’s my brother’s hair, I’m certain, it is him,” Abdullah Qeshta said, his voice trembling. “Oh God, thank you, God.”

Ibrahim’s body was in a state of decay. But in some sense, Alshaar said, she felt “content.” She could give her son the dignity of a proper burial. She could find a place to mourn him.

“He can rest now,” she said.

In an interview, Gaza health official Zaher al-Wahidi put the number of disappeared people and unrecovered bodies at roughly 8,000, based on reports from families about their missing loved ones.

It’s an estimate that’s impossible to verify more than 15 months after Hamas launched its cross-border attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, abducting some 250 people, killing about 1,200, mostly civilians, and triggering the Israeli military’s retaliatory campaign.

But rescue teams, experts and rights groups agree the Health Ministry’s official death toll — 47,283, as of Friday, with no distinction between civilians and combatants — is a significant undercount. Israel blames Hamas for the heavy civilian casualties because the group embeds itself in residential areas.

“Missing” could mean bodies like Ibrahim’s rotting under the ruins or in the blazing sun for months, authorities say. In parts of northern Gaza, where constant Israeli airstrikes and crossfire had blocked ambulances and rescue workers, residents tell of finding bloated corpses strewn in the streets.

The missing, al-Wahidi said, also includes Palestinians killed and buried before they could be identified, or those marched into Israeli detention centers.

Families who accept that their missing are dead have flocked to Gaza’s forensics offices since the ceasefire took hold.

At the main forensics center in Rafah on Wednesday, workers wrapped bodies and small piles of remains in white plastic body bags and placed them on the pavement. Inside, a man brought in to identify a loved one gasped, blinking at a pile of bones. He recognized the scarf and shoe of a family member that was found with them — exactly who was unclear. He was too distraught to talk. He let out a moan as he doubled over.

Investigators scrawled names on the bags in green marker. If the identity remained unknown, they labeled the bags with numbers in hopes of the long-blockaded Gaza Strip one day obtaining the DNA testing that would allow authorities to return the unclaimed dead to their families.

“We leave the numbered bags in a specially designated place where the ministry can identify them in the future,” said Dr. Ahmed Zuhair, director of Rafah’s Department of Forensic Medicine. “All we can do is ask international bodies to please, please help us.”

On Wednesday, officials said some of the recovered bodies had surfaced when recent rains washed away layers of dirt or had been dug up by wild dogs that ripped and scattered people’s limbs.

The rest of the remains were found following hours, sometimes days, of digging and hurling aside mountains of rubble with little more than shovels. Civil defense workers reported that Gaza has no more than three excavators — the kind of heavy machinery needed for rescue work.

“We need help from hundreds of rubble removal specialists and thousands of large machines,” said al-Wahidi. Otherwise, he warned, “we will not be able to recover the bodies.”

Each day of the ceasefire so far, Mohammad Deifallah, like dozens of other Palestinians, has come to the forensics center in Rafah filled with despairing hope.

On Wednesday, he unzipped body bag after body bag, cupping his hand over his nose because of the smell. His brother — who he lost 50 days ago, he said, in the chaotic search for safety as Israel’s bombardment of Rafah intensified — was nowhere to be found.

“I don’t know where to go. I checked all these bodies,” Deifallah said, lifting a tarp to find a skeleton. “Nothing resembles him. Nothing is even recognizable.”

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DeBre reported from Jerusalem. Fatma Khaled in Cairo contributed to this report.

Wafaa Shurafa And Isabel Debre, The Associated Press