Report: "Unspeakable horrors under the rubble"
From the start of their war, Israeli leaders stated that under the rubble Gazans shall be buried and under the rubble they are, now according to a new report. The British newspaper "The Guardian" finds in a report based on testimonies from the Gaza Strip about thousands of victims of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, whose names are not included in the official lists, stressing that "the (announced) toll of 40,000 does not tell the whole story."
The death toll announced by the health authorities in the Gaza Strip, which exceeded 40,000 after ten months of the Israeli aggression on the Strip, represents 2% of the population of the Strip before the war or one in every 50 residents.
The newspaper quoted the director of field hospitals in the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Dr. Marwan Al-Hams, as saying that this number only includes the bodies that have been received and buried, indicating that new procedures are being tested, which have not yet been approved, to include the missing or those known to be under the rubble in the lists of martyrs.
According to Al-Hamas, about 10,000 victims of Israeli airstrikes are still trapped in collapsed buildings, due to the lack of heavy equipment or fuel needed to dig through the steel and concrete rubble in search of them.
The dead who were not killed by bombs or bullets
In addition to the missing and the martyrs whose bodies are trapped under the rubble, Al-Hamas speaks about another group of victims who are excluded from official data, despite their martyrdom due to the indirect effects of war, such as diseases, hunger, and the collapse of the healthcare system, stressing the formation of a committee to count them and will begin its work immediately after the end of the war.
Over the past 10 months, the war has caused mass displacement to crowded shelters and temporary tents, and to starve, with aid shipments decreasing, clean water shortages chronically short, and the sanitation crisis worsening, in addition to hospitals being bombed and besieged, their supplies of medicines, equipment, and fuel cut off, their medical staff being killed or detained, and their wards being overcrowded with patients.
Testimonies from the heart of the ongoing massacre
Dalia Hawass, 24, and her 10-month-old daughter Mona were not included in the list of martyrs in the Gaza Strip, despite their martyrdom together in an airstrike that destroyed the building in which they lived in the Gaza Strip last February, because their bodies were trapped deep under the rubble, such that rescue teams were unable to reach them.
Dalia’s mother, Fatima Hawass, told the newspaper that she felt suffocated whenever she thought of her young daughter, a graduate of Arabic literature, who loved reading and dreamed of becoming a teacher, because after her death she was unable to retrieve her body for a proper burial.
Among the thousands of martyrs who did not appear on the announced lists were Hania Abu Samra, 75, and her son Adnan Abu Samra, 59.
Hania’s granddaughter, Rania Abu Samra, told the newspaper how her grandmother collapsed in front of her in November 2023, after the family was forced to move on foot from the north of the Strip to the south in one day, after the occupation “army” issued an order to evacuate the area due to their inability to secure any means of transportation.
As for Rania’s father, Adnan, he died of a chest infection less than three months later, after the overcrowded hospitals refused to admit him several times.
Rania said that her father, an active man who had managed to deal with his diabetes and high blood pressure before the war, had damaged his lungs during the winter he spent without heating in a makeshift plastic shelter, while being exposed to smoke from cooking on fires made of scrap metal and plastic. By the time a doctor was able to examine him, it was too late.
Rania told the newspaper that she was certain that there were thousands like her father, whose cases no one knew the details of and who were not included among the war’s martyrs, adding: “Don’t think of them as just numbers. They had lives to live, they had families and friends, but they left without even saying goodbye.”
Contrary to the occupation's claim.. The United Nations: The numbers are reliable
Contrary to the Israeli skepticism about the number of victims provided by the authorities in Gaza under the pretext that the government is affiliated with the Hamas movement, the newspaper confirmed that the doctors and civilian employees who run the hospitals and the health system in the Gaza Strip have a reliable record from previous wars.
The newspaper explained that the lists of victims drawn up by UN investigators after repeated rounds of fighting between 2009 and 2021 largely match the lists of victims announced in Gaza.
The newspaper recalled the statement of the spokesman for the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Farhan Haq, who said: "Unfortunately, we have a sad experience in coordinating with the Ministry of Health on the numbers of victims every few years. Their numbers have proven to be generally accurate."
The newspaper confirmed that by mid-August, 32,280 bodies of war victims had been identified by name, most of whom could be classified as civilians by definition due to their age or gender (10,627 children, 5,956 women, and 2,770 elderly people), while other civilians who were counted included 168 journalists, 855 medical personnel, and 79 paramedics.
The newspaper pointed out that more than 20,000 male martyrs of fighting age were also civilians.
The newspaper pointed out that the percentage of civilian casualties is historically very high, and unprecedented in the decades-long conflict between the Palestinians and "Israel", noting that huge bombs fall daily on the Gaza Strip, the latest of which was the targeting of a school that had been turned into a shelter by an airstrike.
The newspaper believed that survivors of death in the Gaza Strip must simultaneously deal with their grief over their deceased loved ones, and with the shock of living in the shadow of death and the constant threat of another attack.
Among these "survivors" is Ali Abbas, whose home was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in November 2023 without an evacuation order or prior warning, killing his two children, Fatima (17 years old) and Omar (5 years old), his brother, and his two nieces, one of whom was only 20 days old.
The newspaper indicated that the news was hidden from Ali, who was seriously injured and spent two weeks in intensive care, noting that when he was informed of this, he tried to disconnect all the tubes keeping him alive, and he now lives with the rest of his family in a tent.
According to the newspaper, the tent seems to be a suitable option for his child, who has developed a phobia of buildings and walls after the building collapsed on the family when it was bombed and the child was pulled out from under the rubble, stressing that he always wakes up to his screams, to the point that he suffers from nightmares that he is still under the rubble and begs: "Help me, help me get out, please."
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