A spokesman for the Strip’s civil defense said as many as 10,000 bodies could still be buried under the ruins of destroyed buildings and that around 2,800 bodies had ‘evaporated’ in Israeli bombardments
Haaretz
Civil defense services in the Gaza Strip began searching Monday for bodies still buried under rubble in areas that were inaccessible before the cease-fire went into effect on Sunday.
Palestinian Civil Defense Spokesman Mahmoud Saber Basal said the organization estimates that the bodies of more than 10,000 people who were not included in the death toll are still buried under the rubble throughout the Strip.
He added that at least 2,840 bodies had vaporized, leaving no trace, as a result of Israel’s use of heavy bombs that produce extremely high temperatures of 7,000 to 9,000 degrees Celsius.
‘We face arduous and difficult tasks,’ Basal said, adding that the Israeli military had prevented its crews from working in areas including the Tel-Sultan part of the Rafah Governate, Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, the Jabalya refugee camp and eastern parts of central Gaza. ‘We are calling for the entry of civil defense crews into the Gaza Strip, with their equipment from sister countries to support us in carrying out our duty to deal with the catastrophic reality left behind by the war, which exceeds the capacity of the civil defense apparatus in the Gaza Strip,’ he said.
Basal said that on Monday, bulldozers began clearing debris and opening roads that had been blocked to traffic, but the Strip lacks the heavy equipment needed to begin reconstruction in earnest.
In a statement, he said that 79 bodies were found in Rafah on Sunday, 21 of which haven’t been identified yet. In an interview with the Qatari TV network Al-Arabi, an employee of his agency described the process of collecting the bodies: forces on the ground locate bodies or body parts, try to find documents or other identifying items, and send the bodies for genetic testing.
The Saudi network Al-Hadath reported that many body parts were found in Rafah and that many had evidence of gunshot wounds.
At a news conference, Basal said that during the war, the Palestinian Civil Defense had retrieved around 38,000 bodies from the rubble of buildings and rescued around 97,000 injured people. He noted that 99 civil defense crew members were killed, 319 were injured and 27 were detained by Israel.
Additionally, 85 percent of the organization’s vehicles were rendered inoperable, and no working vehicles remain in the northern Strip.