The rubble of buildings in the Gaza Strip is no longer merely a source of hardship for Palestinians and an obstacle to rebuilding their city. According to human rights organizations, it has become one of the most important repositories of evidence of Israeli crimes committed in the Strip.
Among the piles of concrete may lie the remains of thousands of missing persons, traces of munitions, projectile fragments, and physical evidence that could one day help uncover the truth about what happened and identify those responsible.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor warns that Israel is carrying out extensive operations to break up the rubble and transport it out of the Gaza Strip, a move it says threatens to obliterate physical evidence of genocide before forensic teams and criminal evidence experts can examine and document the sites.
The Monitor states that its field data indicates that at least 10 million tons of rubble have been removed, broken up, and transported from areas under Israeli military control within the Strip, using approximately 400 pieces of excavation, demolition, crushing, and transport machinery operated by Israeli civilian companies under the protection of the army. The Observatory also noted – in recent weeks – the daily movement of approximately 100 trucks loaded with rubble to undisclosed locations inside Israel and in the southern occupied West Bank. There has been no official announcement regarding the quantities transported, their destinations, or the recipients, and no independent international monitoring of the transport and sorting operations has been permitted.
The Observatory believes that the danger of these operations lies not only in their timing and method but also in their secrecy and the fact that they are being carried out before any independent forensic examination of the destruction sites. This could lead to the destruction of crucial evidence related to the type of weapons used, the direction of the attacks, the locations of the victims, and potentially the locations of mass graves or bodies still buried under the rubble.
The Observatory further warns that the use of crushers and heavy machinery could crush the remains of thousands of missing persons, whose number is estimated by the Civil Defense in Gaza at approximately 8,500, or mix them with the rubble and transport them to unknown locations, thus depriving their families of knowing their fate or burying them with dignity.
