Gaza Buries 100 Martyrs... Thousands of Bodies Remain Under the Rubble
Palestinians today, Sunday, mourned the bodies of 100 martyrs, recovered from beneath the rubble in the devastated Gaza Strip, while rights organizations warned that debris removal operations carried out by the Israeli occupation threaten to turn these ruins into a silent witness to a collective crime and erase the last link connecting families with their missing loved ones.
Civil Defense estimates indicate that more than 8,000 bodies remain trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings across various areas of the Strip.
Field data reveals that approximately 70 percent of the martyrs are children and women, highlighting the severe loss of civilian lives. In one incident alone, 55 members of the “Malaka” family were killed after seeking refuge in a house to escape shelling, only for it to be destroyed above them.
A spokesperson for the Civil Defense pointed to victims located in the “Yellow Zone,” an area difficult to access. He relayed testimonies from residents stating that the occupation has bulldozed homes and transported concrete blocks and bodies to other locations, completely erasing cemetery landmarks.
Recent estimates issued by the Gaza Municipality and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) indicate that the volume of rubble resulting from Israeli military operations in the Strip has reached approximately 70 million tons.
The estimates added that the number of buildings leveled exceeds 123,000, with damage affecting another 75,000 buildings, equivalent to 81 percent of the Strip’s infrastructure.
Media reports have revealed that the Israeli army is conducting a “privatization of destruction” through large contracts with civilian contractors, who are paid an average of 5,000 shekels (approximately $1,500) for each Palestinian home they level.
It is confirmed that “large Israeli trucks daily transport stones, cement, and rebar from the destroyed neighborhoods in Gaza into Israeli territory, where the remnants of Palestinian homes are processed in recycling plants into construction materials sold in the Israeli market at high prices to construction and real estate development companies.”
The Palestinian Center for Missing Persons described the debris removal operations as a “de facto death sentence for thousands of missing persons under the rubble,” as they crush what remains of victims’ bodies and mix body parts with rubble and waste, making future DNA testing or identification of the missing impossible.
