GAZA (Palestine Foundation Information Center) The Palestinian Civil Defense announced on Tuesday that more than 10,000 missing people are still under the rubble of hundreds of destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip since the start of the Israeli aggression.
The estimated number of missing people is not included in the Health Ministry’s announced death toll, which means the number of martyrs exceeds 44,000, the Civil Defense said in its statement.
The statement stressed that Civil Defense crews continued to carry out their humanitarian duty despite the lack of equipment, vehicles, and mechanisms necessary to search for the missing amid the ongoing Israeli aggression on the Strip for more than two hundred days.
It pointed out that thousands of citizens lost their lives because its crews have been prevented from reaching and rescuing them from under piles of rubble since the start of the Israeli aggression.
The Civil Defense received many calls from residents and volunteer youth teams to back up individual efforts and initiatives to exhume martyrs’ bodies from homes and residential buildings that were destroyed several months ago, the statement added.
Crews in northern Gaza have embarked on these tasks with the support of volunteers and teams using simple hand tools amid shortage in human cadre, capabilities, equipment, and heavy machinery. However, they were able to recover several completely decomposed bodies.
The statement stressed that with the lack of heavy equipment such as bulldozers and excavators, these efforts remain insufficient and do not meet the minimum needs necessary to recover the bodies of thousands of martyrs.
It was estimated that working with such a primitive mechanism would take two to three years to retrieve those bodies, especially since UN officials estimated that the Israeli war left at least 37 million tons of debris across the Gaza Strip.
The Civil Defense warned that the continued accumulation of thousands of bodies under the rubble began to spread diseases and epidemics, especially with the onset of summer and the rise in temperatures, which accelerated the process of decomposition.
The Civil Defense renewed its appeal to all relevant parties including the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Committee for Civil Protection, and all workers and stakeholders in the humanitarian field to urgently intervene and push for the entry of heavy equipment needed to save the lives of the wounded and to recover the bodies of martyrs.
