GAZA CITY: Crouching amid a pile of rubble that used to be his Gaza home, Mahmoud Hammad scoops dirt into a large sieve and shakes it, looking carefully before dumping it out.
In recent days, he was lucky. Tiny bones appeared.
He believes they belong to the unborn girl his pregnant wife was carrying when an Israeli airstrike hit the family’s building more than two years ago, killing his wife and their five children.
He added the fragments to a box of bones he has collected during months of burrowing into the wreckage on his own, using picks, shovels and his hands.
“I won’t find them all,” he said.
Some 8,000 people remain buried under the rubble of their homes destroyed by Israel’s bombardment during its campaign against Hamas, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. While airstrikes and ground assaults raged, retrieving most was out of the question. But since a ceasefire deal in October, efforts to dig them out have increased, though hampered by the lack of heavy equipment.
‘They were martyred, and I survived’
Around 11:30 a.m. on Dec. 6, 2023, an Israeli strike smashed into the six-story building where the families of Hammad and his brother lived in Gaza City’s Sabra neighborhood.
The 39-year-old Hammad had just stepped out of the apartment to go upstairs as his wife Nema Hammad, who was nine months pregnant, and their five children, aged 8 to 16, were finishing breakfast.
In the days leading to the strike, the Israeli military had dropped leaflets over the area, ordering people to leave and head to the southern half of the strip. Mahmoud Hammad refused to leave.
For a while, Nema Hammad and the kids went to her parents’ home in the nearby Jabaliya district, while her husband stayed behind. But Nema Hammad wanted to come back. Her husband tried to discourage her, with Israeli bombardment all around. But on Dec. 5, he found his wife and kids at his door.
“Either we live together or we are martyred together,” he said his wife told him.
“They were martyred, and I survived,” he said. His brother, sister-in-law and their four sons were also all killed.
Mahmoud Hammad was taken to a nearby clinic with multiple injuries, including fractures in the chest, pelvis, knee and internal chest bleeding.
After the strike, neighbors were able to recover the body of his eldest son, Ismail, and two of his brother’s children.
The rest remained under the rubble.
Digging through his home
After recovering from his wounds, Hammad returned to his home’s ruins and set up a shelter nearby to live in.
“I stayed with them, my wife and children, in the rubble,” he said. “Every day, I am talking to them. Their scent lingered, and I felt a deep connection with them.”
He began the search for their bodies. He first sought help from Gaza’s Civil Defense corps. But rescue teams never came, either because it was too dangerous amid intense Israeli bombing or because they didn’t have the equipment and machinery to remove the rubble.
So he started digging himself. He began with the collapsed ceilings and walls, breaking them into small stones and putting them in sacks. Piles of dozens of sacks now surround the site like a wall.
In March 2024, he found some remains he believed were of his family.
“There were simple bones covered with flesh … some of which had been eaten by animals,” he said.
In late 2024, he had dug down to his brother’s apartment, which had been on the third floor, where he found the bodies of his brother and sister-in-law. He buried them in a temporary graveyard that residents of the area created during the war to hold their dead until they could be moved to a proper cemetery.
Since October, Hammad resumed digging. He drove down nine meters (30 feet). Finally, he reached his own apartment, which had been on the ground floor. Now he has been focusing on clearing rubble from the eastern side, because that’s where he knows his wife was in her last moments.
“They were eating rice pudding in the living room,” he said.
Sifting through the dirt with his sieve, he found tiny bone fragments. He shared images of the bones through WhatsApp with a doctor who said the fragments, which included a jawbone, appear to be for a small baby.
He believes it’s the remains of the baby girl they had been waiting for. They had planned to name her Haifa, after one of Hammad’s sisters-in-law who was killed by an Israeli strike just a few weeks before the strike on their home.
“All the baby’s clothes, a crib, and a room were prepared, and everyone at home was waiting for her arrival,” he said.
Discovering the bone fragments has brought him hope.
“There’s a clue that I’m reaching my wife and other children,” he said.
Once he collects enough remains, he said, he will give them a proper burial.
61 million tons of rubble
More than 700 bodies have been recovered from under buildings since the ceasefire began, Zaher Al-Waheidi, head of the Health Ministry’s records department, told The Associated Press.
Each is added to a list of the dead from the war – now more than 72,000, according to the ministry, part of the Hamas-led government that maintains detailed casualty records seen as generally reliable by UN agencies and independent experts, though it does not give a breakdown of civilians and militants.
Israeli bombardment destroyed or damaged 81 percent of the strip’s 250,000 buildings, including schools, hospitals and private houses, according to the UN’s satellite imagery analysis unit.
That has left Gaza as one of the most devastated places on earth with 61 million tons of rubble — about as much as 15 Great Pyramids of Giza or 25 Eiffel Towers by volume, according to the UN
Digging out has been made more difficult by the lack of bulldozers and heavy equipment, which Israel often bars from entering Gaza.
Rescue work remains impossible in the more than 50 percent of the Gaza Strip that remains under Israeli military control. There, the military has been systematically blowing up and bulldozing buildings, further reducing the possibility of finding any bodies lost inside.
About two months ago, the UN and the Red Cross coordinated the entry of an excavator for the Civil Defense, said Karem Al-Dalu, a Civil Defense worker.
“But that’s not enough,” Al-Dalu said. He spoke as he and other rescue workers, using the new excavator, cleared the rubble of a building in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood.
The building was leveled by an airstrike on Dec. 11, 2023, with some 120 people inside, said Rafiq Abdel-Khaleq Salem, whose immediate family was among those sheltering inside.
“Their only crime was that they didn’t leave, so they flattened the building over them,” he said.
In the days following the strike, 66 bodies were recovered, he said. Another 54 people remained buried under the rubble.
Rescue workers were finally able to come back to the site over the weekend. They managed to find 27 more bodies, but the rest remain missing, including Salem’s wife and their four children.
“It is a painful feeling,” he said. “I hoped to find my wife and children to bury them in graves and visit them.”