Palestinians dig to retrieve bodies buried in rubble in northern Gaza

GAZA CITY, Palestine

Civil defense teams and volunteers have joined hands to extract the bodies of dead Palestinians from under the rubble of destroyed buildings in the northern Gaza Strip, according to a local official on Monday.

“We resume our work [in northern Gaza] after a 100-day hiatus,” Ahmed al-Kahlout, head of the Civil Defense Agency, told Anadolu.

He said the recovered bodies will be examined, documented and identified before being buried in northern Gaza.

Kahlout said civil defense teams and volunteers are working with limited equipment.

“The Israeli army has destroyed the agency’s drills, bulldozers, and machines,” he added.

Eid Sabah, the nursing director at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, said the Health Ministry has enough information about the number of those under the rubble.

“Work has begun to extract and bury the victims in the designated cemeteries,” he told Anadolu.

"There are about 10,000 bodies still missing under the rubble in various parts of the strip," he added.

Israel has waged a brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Oct. 7 last year, which Tel Aviv says killed nearly 1,200 people.

Nearly 34,500 Palestinians have since been killed, mostly women and children, and over 77,600 others injured amid mass destruction and severe shortages of necessities.

More than six months into the Israeli war, vast swathes of Gaza lay in ruins, pushing 85% of the enclave’s population into internal displacement amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water and medicine, according to the UN.

Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.

*Writing by Mohammad Sio in Istanbul