Beneath Gaza’s rubble lie the missing – and possible evidence
Three years after the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the subsequent war, much of Gaza is still in ruins – and many families still haven’t found the buried bodies of their loved ones. Investigators from Geneva-based institutions are slowly documenting what lies beneath the rubble and pressing for its clearance to enable dignified burials and preserve evidence of possible war crimes.
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Beneath Gaza’s rubble lie the missing – and possible evidence
More than two years after an explosion reduced his apartment building to rubble, Hamada Abu Hasira, a 29-year-old cook working for a charity in Gaza, is still searching for traces of his brother. Without the remains he cannot be assured his brother is truly dead and there is little chance those responsible will ever be held accountable.
He remembers that evening in March 2024 distinctly.
Night was falling over Deir Al-Hawa, the Gaza neighbourhood where he had lived, and the streets had largely emptied following Israeli evacuation orders. In the quiet, Abu Hasira could hear the rumble of tanks and military vehicles, punctuated by the voices of Israeli forces.
He and his family struggled to sleep. They had chosen the top floor deliberately. If the building was struck, they thought, being higher up might give rescuers a better chance of finding them.
And, the family thought, “if we are hit, we would rather be killed together”.
Then they heard movement around the entrance of the building. When the quiet returned, one of Hamada’s brothers went downstairs to check the family car and see whether they might still be able to leave, ignoring pleas from his family not to go because it was too dangerous.
Outside, he saw what looked like barrels of explosives. Inside the family’s car, a device was ticking. He ran back upstairs. His father decided that no one would go downstairs again. They would wait for daylight, then leave.
The blast came before dawn. The building collapsed over them. Abu Hasira spent more than 24 hours beneath the rubble before a neighbour heard his screams and helped pull him out. He and his mother Reem survived.
“I called my brother Ahmed. He answered me at first, but then his voice went quiet. That’s when I knew he was gone,” Abu Hasira, who works as a cook for a local organisation, told Swissinfo.
The bodies of his father Imran and brother Ahmed were recovered. His younger brother, Momen, is still missing. The absence of all three hurts him daily, more so as he prepared to celebrate his wedding.
The details of his account could not be independently verified and are based on the survivor’s recollection of events, as are all eyewitness accounts detailed in this story. Israel has barred international journalists from entering Gaza and has denied access to UN and other international investigative bodies, limiting documentation work and independent verification on the ground.
The accounts in this story were gathered by a Swissinfo correspondent in Gaza through interviews with survivors and neighbours. They echo cases documented by UN officials, who have briefed journalists in Geneva on efforts to recover remains from beneath the rubble.
Thousands still beneath the rubble
Across Gaza, entire families have been buried beneath collapsed buildings, many killed and countless others still missing in a landscape of shattered concrete. For families, the priority is to recover and bury their loved ones; for UN investigators, the same rubble may hold evidence of how they died. Gathering evidence in war zones is always challenging and can take years. In Gaza, it is complicated by the scale of destruction.
The war that followed the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 has left much of Gaza in ruins. By June 2026, the United Nations estimated that 82% of all structures in Gaza had been damaged, including 134,422 which were assessed as destroyed.
Much of that rubble has yet to be cleared. “It is estimated that at least 8,000 bodies remain buried under the rubble across the Gaza Strip,” Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN human rights office in the occupied Palestinian territory, told journalists in Geneva.
“At this pace, completing the recovery of the remaining bodies will take at least ten more years,” he said, speaking from Amman, Jordan.
Years without answers
For many families, the uncertainty has lasted for years.
In Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood, an Israeli strike flattened the Abu Zour family home on December 4, 2023, according to neighbour Mohammed Al-Harazin. A 13-year-old girl was the sole survivor, he remembers. Around 50 relatives and displaced people were killed.
“The bodies of those who were killed remained under the rubble (until September) because the area was dangerous and it was difficult to carry out recovery efforts,” says Al-Harazin, an engineering student who had to relocate to Al-Mawasi in the southwestern Gaza Strip due to the war.
Amal Maqbel’s father, Ashraf, has been missing since an Israeli strike destroyed the family’s six-story building on December 6, 2023. “We did not know whether my father was still inside, whether he had managed to get out, or what had happened to him,” she said.
Recent findings reveal the scale of loss
Cases documented by the UN tell similar stories. Recent recoveries have begun to reveal the scale of what remains beneath Gaza’s ruins. More than 630 bodies and other human remains were recovered between November 2025 and September 2026, according to Palestinian Civil Defence figures cited by the UN.
“The remains recovered so far may only be the tip of the iceberg,” said UN human rights spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan.
In September, the remains of 96 people from three Palestinian families were recovered from beneath the rubble in Gaza City, according to the UN human rights office, OHCHR. Around half were women and children.
Sunghay cited the case of the Malaka family, who lost 72 members in an Israeli airstrike on family homes in November 2023. Only three bodies were recovered at the time.
Remains believed to belong to 55 members of the family were among those recovered in September. The bodies of the remaining 14 are still missing beneath the rubble.
The scale of the destruction, Sunghay noted, is also making identification more difficult.
“The sheer explosive power of heavy munitions sometimes left no recoverable remains,” he said, speaking from Amman. “And it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish rubble from remains as the years pass.”
A recovery effort starved of resources
The recovery effort is hampered by acute shortages of machinery, fuel and personnel.
Sunghay said Palestinian Civil Defence teams had only one functioning excavator and were at times digging through rubble by hand because Israel restricts the entry of heavy equipment and trained recovery teams.
Israel says equipment entering Gaza is subject to security controls. COGAT, the Israeli military body that controls access to the territory, has justified restrictions on items it says could be used for a “terrorist build-up”. The Israeli military says Hamas used engineering vehicles to breach the barrier on October 7, 2023, and later to dig tunnels, plant explosives and retrieve weapons from rubble, calling them “a central component in Hamas’ ability to carry out terror operations.”
For some families, even reaching the ruins is impossible.
“Most of the territory of Gaza is now beyond the Yellow Line, inaccessible to Palestinians, including civil defence teams and families of missing persons,” Sunghay explained.
The Yellow Line is the shifting boundary separating areas of Gaza under Israeli military control from areas Palestinians can still access.
The October 2025 ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas led to the return of all Israeli hostages and their remains. In return, Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees and returned Palestinian bodies it had been holding.
But key parts of the ceasefire remain incomplete. Hamas and other armed groups have not disarmed, Israel has not completed its planned withdrawal, and reconstruction (estimated by the UN and the World Bank to cost at least $71 billion, or CHF60 billion) has yet to begin at scale.
Preserving evidence
Clearing Gaza’s rubble is not only a question of reconstruction and recovering the missing. UN human rights officials say destroyed sites may also contain evidence relevant to investigations into alleged violations of international law.
“Recovering and burying the victims does not substitute for establishing the circumstances in which they were killed,” al-Kheetan told journalists in September.
UN satellite assessments do not attribute responsibility for each destroyed building. UN human rights bodies, however, have linked the overwhelming destruction of Gaza’s built environment to Israeli airstrikes, shelling and ground operations.
UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese has warned that rubble clearance could destroy both human remains and potential evidence. “Gaza’s rubble contains human remains and physical evidence relevant to the investigation of alleged international crimes,” she said.
Albanese remains under controversial US sanctions over her outspoken criticism of Israel.
OHCHR has also warned that destroyed sites may contain evidence that needs preserving. Al-Kheetan said the office had grave concerns that Israel’s methods of warfare, including the use of wide-area explosive weapons in densely populated areas, “failed to ensure that they effectively distinguish between civilians and fighters.”
Israel insists its forces make these distinctions, in accordance with international humanitarian law and take precautions to minimise civilian harm, such as intelligence-based targeting and issuing evacuation orders. But it also argues those efforts are complicated by Hamas operating within civilian areas and infrastructure.
Now displaced and staying with relatives in central Gaza, Abu Hasira is still waiting for news of his younger brother, Momen. He fears the worst but wants at least to recover his body and give him a dignified burial. It is a wish shared by thousands of families across Gaza.
“They have a right to know the fates of their children, parents, siblings, cousins,” Sunghay said. “They have a right to mourn them with dignity, and they have a right to justice.”
UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk has called on Israel to facilitate the recovery, identification and dignified burial of the dead “without delay”.
UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk has called on Israel to facilitate the recovery, identification and dignified burial of the dead “without delay”.
Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, said Türk had ignored Hamas abuses and jumped to accuse Israel before facts had been established.
Palestinian groups have asked the UN and relevant countries to set up a neutral body to recover the remains of the missing.
Hassan Herzallah is a Palestinian writer and translator based in Gaza
Edited by Imogen Foulkes/dos/vdv/vm
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