"Since the US-brokered ceasefire was announced on 10 October, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians in Gaza; according to a UN official, at least 70 are children – like Jumaa and Fadi."

A boy sits slumped amid the rubble in Nuseirat, central Gaza, after an overnight Israeli airstrike on 29 October in which at least 50 Palestinians died. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images

 ‘Bloodshed was supposed to stop’: no sign of normal life as Gaza’s killing and misery grind on

Seham Tantesh in Gaza, Julian Borger and Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem

 Sat 6 Dec 2025

The term ceasefire ‘risks creating a dangerous illusion life is returning to normal’ for Palestinians squeezed into the remaining 42% of their land behind Israel’s ‘yellow line’

When Jumaa and Fadi Abu Assi went to look for firewood their parents thought they would be safe. They were just young boys, aged nine and 10 and, after all, a ceasefire had been declared in Gaza.

Their mother, Hala Abu Assi, was making tea in the family’s tent in Khan Younis when she heard an explosion, a missile fired by an Israeli drone. She ran to the scene – but it was too late.

Since the US-brokered ceasefire was announced on 10 October, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians in Gaza; according to a UN official, at least 70 are children – like Jumaa and Fadi.

They were killed, their mother said, at “a time when bloodshed was supposed to stop”.

“After the ceasefire was announced, I felt a bit of safety and believed that nothing would harm my children any more,” Abu Assi said. “But fate had another plan.”

She is focused now on keeping her two surviving daughters alive. “I still hear explosions and gunfire,” she said. “I do not feel that the war has ended.”

The toll from Israeli attacks in Gaza has fallen significantly compared with the preceding two years of war, when on average 90 Palestinians were killed each day, but significant numbers of civilians are still losing their lives.

On average, Israeli weapons now kill seven people a day. That rate of violent death would be considered an active conflict in many other contexts, raising questions about how accurately “ceasefire” describes the new status quo.

“It’s something that if you want to you can call a ceasefire, which is very convenient for the Americans and for everyone who wants this off their television screens and off their streets and off their annoying parliamentary and political schedules,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator and the president of the US/Middle East Project....READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/06/bloodshed-was-supposed-to-stop-no-sign-of-normal-life-as-gazas-killing-and-misery-grind-on

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The grim task of recovering thousands of bodies from the rubble of Gaza. Relatives and experts tell of the human and societal need to find and identify the dead, while images and data shed light on the scale of the job

News story in The Guardian

By Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem and Seham Tantesh in Gaza. Graphics by Ana Lucía González Paz, Lucy Swan and Paul Scruton

Sun 2 Nov 2025 06.15 EST

It has been described as one of the most gruelling recovery efforts in modern warfare. 

As negotiations over the fragile Gaza ceasefire continue, Palestinians have started to dig through 61m tonnes of debris, 20 times more than the combined mass of all debris generated by conflicts since 2008. Underneath, at least 10,000 people are thought to be buried.

The Guardian spoke with several families in Gaza desperately searching for the bodies of their missing relatives, as well as members of the Palestinian civil defence, a branch of the security services responsible for emergency services and rescue operations. Photos, video footage and data shed light on the scale of the task ahead.

Widespread destruction across the Gaza Strip has generated more than 61m tonnes of debris

 

77% of the Gaza Strip’s road network has been blocked, damaged or destroyed

 

8m tonnes of debris is potentially hazardous

 

At least 300 injured and 50 killed by unexploded ordnance

Cumulative incidents reported to UNMAS 

Casualties arriving at Gaza's hospital morgues

 

... Still buried a year on

On 29 October 2024, the five-storey house in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, where Aya Abu Nasr’s extended family lived collapsed after an Israeli airstrike.

“Most of my family members had been staying on the ground and first floors,” said Nasr, 26. “I lost five of my siblings – two brothers and three sisters – along with all their families. More than 100 members of my extended family died in that strike, and about 50 of them are still under the rubble to this day, a full year later.”.... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/02/the-grim-task-of-recovering-thousands-of-bodies-from-the-rubble-of-gaza 

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‘It’s like a nuclear bomb has hit’: shocked Palestinians return home to desolation. Families are going back to Gaza City and surrounds to find their neighbourhoods obliterated, with many forced to camp in the ruins.- By Seham Tantesh in Gaza and Julian Borger in The Guardian

‘All our memories were gone’: shattered buildings in Gaza City after the Israeli offensive.

Photograph: AP

When the Gaza ceasefire took effect a week ago, tens of thousands of Palestinians began to move from the sprawling camps in the south back to their homes in Gaza City and the surrounding area.

For most, it was a shocking and bitter homecoming.

A month after they had been ordered out by Israeli forces, Palestinians filled the coastal road north. It soon became a solid river of people, mostly trudging on foot, carrying the few possessions they had salvaged from one displacement after another.

What the returnees found on arrival was complete desolation. Large swaths of the north had simply been flattened. Their homes and neighbourhoods were no longer recognisable. Their communities had been erased.

The sheer scale of demolition left families with an awful dilemma: stay and seek shelter in the shattered stumps of their former homes, or return to the tented camps in the south where they had a better chance of finding food and water. And looming over that decision was the great unknown of how long the truce would last, and whether it would ever take hold as a lasting peace.

“I had hoped to return and find my home standing, but what I found was quite the opposite. I couldn’t even recognise the area. Everything was levelled to the ground,” Suhair al-Absi, a 50-year-old mother of seven, said on reaching the Sheikh Radwan district on the north side of Gaza City. “I couldn’t identify the remains of my house because the rubble of everyone’s homes is all mixed together. The destruction here is beyond imagination, something the mind cannot grasp.”

The family had clung to their home until the last minute as the Israeli army pressed forward through Gaza City in September, supposedly to crush any vestiges of Hamas. “We left when the tanks reached the entrance to our neighborhood. We could see them from the window,” Absi said.

It was not only tanks. The family saw one house after another being blown up by “robots” – repurposed armoured vehicles steered by remote control and packed with explosives, which the Israel Defense Forces have been using to minimise their casualties... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/18/its-like-a-nuclear-bomb-has-hit-shocked-palestinians-return-home-to-desolation?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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‘My heart is broken’: Palestinians begin searching the Gaza rubble for their dead. Using manual tools and their bare hands, people start the immense task of trying to find their loved ones’ remains

The destruction left by Israel’s offensive on Gaza City. Photograph: Amjed Tantesh/The Guardian

 Seham Tantesh in Gaza and William Christou in Jerusalem

Sun 12 Oct 2025

Ghali Khadr spent two days pleading with his parents to flee with him to southern Gaza, warning them that it was too dangerous to stay. His father, known for being stubborn, refused. Their argument was never finished – an Israeli airstrike hit his father’s home, burying his parents beneath the rubble.

On Sunday, two days after the ceasefire was announced, Khadr returned to search through the ruins of his parents’ home. He spent the day sifting through shattered concrete and twisted metal for any sign of them. All he managed to find were some shards of their skulls and parts of their hands.

“My father, a retired ambulance driver, was known for his strong will and patience. He did not know fear and was always optimistic,” said Khadr, 40, of Jabaliya in northern Gaza.

Khadr took the remains of his parents to the graveyard, but found that it too had been destroyed. He decided to bury them next to the few graves that were still intact. 

Like Khadr, thousands of Palestinians have returned to northern Gaza since Friday’s ceasefire with a grim task ahead of them: searching for loved ones killed weeks or months earlier in Israeli airstrikes and whose bodies are buried under the rubble.

Gaza’s civil defence agency estimates that the bodies of about 10,000 people are trapped under the debris and collapsed buildings. The halt in the fighting has given the ambulance service the chance to finally start the search for the dead and give their families a chance at closure.

The task ahead of the rescuers is immense given an estimated 60m tonnes of rubble across the territory.

Most roads have been destroyed or blocked by debris. Civil defence workers are short of heavy equipment and have to use pickaxes and sledgehammers to break through collapsed buildings. Rescue crews have to move slowly. The debris is also full of unexploded bombs and ordnance.

“At first, we are focusing on... " READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/my-heart-is-broken-palestinians-begin-searching-the-gaza-rubble-for-their-dead?CMP=share_btn_url

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