Civil defense personnel in the Gaza Strip are facing a tough and exhausting battle to recover thousands of bodies and people trapped under the rubble scattered across various governorates of the Strip. These operations continue amid a severe shortage suffered by the rescue and ambulance services due to the complete depletion of fuel and the destruction of most vehicles, heavy machinery, and equipment needed to remove fallen debris, which has turned search and rescue operations into a long and draining process.
Mahmoud Bassal, spokesperson for civil defense in Gaza, described the state of relief equipment in the Strip after three years of the genocide war: ‘We currently have only one bulldozer operating in Gaza, and a new bulldozer was added in June, which is now working in the central area. We rely on just two bulldozers to extract an entire group of victims.’
He added while talking about the latest statistics of Palestinian martyrs: ‘There are about eight thousand martyrs under the rubble. During the ceasefire phases, our forces managed to recover around a thousand martyrs. Today, we are working in one of the buildings targeted in December 2023, which is the house of the Atta Allah family, where some of its members are still inside. There are between 30 to 40 martyrs in this house, and we are currently extracting their remains. Since the start of the attacks until now, we have rarely succeeded in finding a complete body of a martyr; the vast majority are body parts and remains, and sometimes we don’t find any trace of a person’s body.’
