Thousands of bodies lie buried in rubble in Gaza. Families dig to retrieve them, often by hand
They are looking for the bodies of their children. Their parents. Their neighbors.
All of them killed in Israeli missile strikes. The corpses are there, somewhere in the endless acres of destruction.
More than five weeks into Israel's war against Hamas, some streets are now more like graveyards. Officials in Gaza say they don't have the equipment, manpower or fuel to search properly for the living, let alone the dead.
Hamas, the militant group behind the deadly Oct.
7 attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel, has many of its bases within Gaza's crowded neighborhoods. Israel is targeting those strongholds.
But the victims are often everyday Palestinians, many of whom have yet to be found.
Omar al-Darawi and his neighbors have spent weeks searching the ruins of a pair of four-story houses in central Gaza.
Forty-five people lived in the homes; 32 were killed. In the first days after the attack, 27 bodies were recovered.
The five still missing were al-Darawi's cousins.
They include Amani, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom who died with her husband and their four children. There's Aliaa, 28, who was taking care of her aging parents.
There's another Amani, who died with her 14-year-old daughter. Her husband and their five sons survived.
«The situation has become worse every day,» said the 23-year-old, who was once a college journalism student. The smell has become unbearable.
«We can't stop,» he said.
«We just want to find and bury them» before their bodies are lost in the rubble forever.
More than 11,400 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and minors, according to Palestinian health authorities. The U.N. humanitarian affairs office estimates that about 2,700 people, including 1,500 children,
