“We call on the world to send international teams to recover the bodies of the missing,” said the member of one civil society group. “We call on the world to provide the necessary equipment to recover the bodies.”

A civil society group in  Gaza on Thursday appealed for international assistance to help recover the bodies of more than 10,000  Palestinians, killed by Israeli forces, who remain buried beneath the rubble of the flattened strip.

Referring to  Gaza as “the world’s largest mass grave,” Aladdin Al-Aklouk, a spokesperson for the National Committee for Missing Persons in the  Genocide Against Gaza,  said that “these martyrs were buried under the rubble of their homes, which have turned into mass graves, without their final dignity being preserved or their bodies being retrieved".

“We express our shock and strong condemnation of the absence of an effective role by international organisations and humanitarian bodies, especially those concerned with the issue of missing persons, in light of the ongoing escalating humanitarian disaster,” he said.

“The remnants are ticking time bombs and pose a danger to the population in the Gaza Strip. We need specialists alongside the teams working in the sector,” he added. “We call on the world to send international teams to recover the bodies of the missing. We call on the world to provide the necessary equipment to recover the bodies.”

According to the Gaza Health Ministry — whose casualty figures have been deemed accurate by Israeli military officials and  a likely undercount by multiple peer-reviewed studies — at least 68,875 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since 7 October 2023. Although a US-brokered ceasefire technically remains in effect, Gaza officials have documented more than 200 Israeli violations in which more than 240 Palestinians have been killed and more than 600 others injured.

More than 170,600 other Gazans have been wounded in a war which is the subject of an ongoing  International Court of Justice  genocide case and for which Israeli Prime Minister  Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant are  wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and  war crimes, including murder and forced  starvation.

Palestinians are  struggling to dig through more than 60 million tons of debris after more than 80% of all structures in Gaza were destroyed or damaged by two years of Israeli bombardment. That’s more than 200,000 buildings and other structures.

United Nations experts  estimate it will take seven years for 100 trucks to remove all debris across Gaza, where more than three-quarters of roads are damaged, and unexploded ordnance and Israeli booby traps beneath the debris continue to pose deadly threats to recovery  workers and survivors in general.

Israel’s  destruction and denial of the heavy equipment needed for such a monumental recovery operation has left Palestinians reliant upon rudimentary tools such as shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, rakes, hoes, and even their bare hands. They dig amid the stench of death and decomposition that lingers in the air.

The Abu Naser family  lost more than 130 members in a 29 October 2024 strike on their five-storey home in Beit Lahia, where more than 200 people were sheltering when it was bombed. Mohammed Nabil Abu Naser, who survived the bombing, immediately started digging through the rubble, first in search of survivors and later, for bodies.

“It was all bodies and body parts,” he explained. More than a year later, many of the victims have yet to be recovered.

“About 50 of them are still under the rubble to this day, a full year later,” Abu Naser  told The Guardian on Monday.

Often, Gazans survived initial bombings, only to die slowly trapped beneath rubble. Two American volunteer surgeons, Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, last year described how wounded survivors suffered “unimaginably cruel deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during the day and a freezer at night".

“One shudders to think how many  children have died this way in Gaza,” they added.

Republished from CounterPunch, 6 November 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.