Asaad Oroq, Bahaa Oroq, Raghad Saleh Farwaneh, Israa Ola Saleh Farwaneh, Saleh Rahaf Ahmed Qanita, Refaat Alareer... Thousands of men, women and children join the list of those who can be considered the latest victims of the war in Gaza.
They are those whose bodies have not been recovered or located.
Those that have been rotting for weeks or months under the rubble of the buildings bombed by the Israeli army.
Those that are abandoned on streets and highways, sometimes eaten by hungry animals where troops prevent access.
Those that have evaporated without a trace…
The number offered by the Civil Defense corps, in charge of rescues, supported by institutions such as the Red Crescent, is at least 7,000.
They are the unregistered dead and missing, those who are left out of the almost 29,000 officials counted by the health authorities of the Strip, in the hands of the Hamas authorities.
Ahmed Omar Farawaneh, 26, is the only survivor in his family.
He says that his life was going well running a digital
marketing
company in Gaza, from where he worked with companies in Saudi Arabia.
Two days before October 7, when Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis marking the start of the war, he had traveled to a conference in Switzerland.
It was around noon on the 15th when he was alerted of an attack and began trying to contact his family, but it was not possible.
Hours later he learned that his house had been bombed and that everyone had died.
“I lost 16 members of my family, including my mother and my father, former dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the Islamic University.
Also my sisters Aya and Isra, with their husbands and children.
And my brother, Abdulaziz, with his wife and his children.
“They were all civilians and the majority of the martyrs [way of referring to those who die in the conflict], children,” she details.
“We couldn't find or bury three of my nephews.
They are Raghad Saleh Farawaneh, 14 years old;
Israa Ola Saleh Farawaneh, eight;
Saleh Rahaf Ahmed Qanita, nine″, laments Farawaneh, who is waiting in Turkey for the end of the war.
His testimony, like the rest of the dozen collected for this report over two weeks due to communication problems with Gaza, comes through written and voice messages on the phone.
“This is a thorny and complicated issue.
Since the beginning of the war the numbers have not stopped growing dramatically every day, although we try to do our best to remove all the bodies from the rubble,” comments Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for the Gaza Civil Defense service. whose troops and equipment have been greatly depleted in these more than four months of fighting.
Sometimes, the only solution is to write the names of those who could not be rescued with spray on the stones to mark the place and thus facilitate the tasks of recovering them on the day possible.
Home of the Oroq family, where 21 of its members were killed in an Israeli bombing on December 20.
“On December 20, the Israeli army bombed our family home and I lost 21 people: my mother, three brothers, their wives and their sons and daughters.
For 10 days they tried to extract the bodies, but it was not possible in the case of my brother Asaad, a 45-year-old public employee, and his son Bahaa, a 23-year-old university student who was going to get married this summer," says the journalist. Gazan Abdulrrahim Oroq, who has lived in Istanbul for eight years.
“In the absence of members of the rescue teams and tools, neighbors and relatives were in charge of helping recover the dead, some of them already decomposed and unable to identify them.
They were buried in a soccer field near Sheik Radwan, the neighborhood where we live in Gaza City,” he adds.
“I hope you are in paradise”
“I hope they are in paradise,” wishes Ibrahim Bahjat abu Dan, a resident of the Bureij refugee camp, in the center of the Palestinian enclave, who was injured in the bombing of his home and other adjacent homes where other relatives lived.
“It was torture, because we dead knew they were dead, but we couldn't get the living out,” he explains while remembering some of the victims, like his cousin Maher and his daughter.
“There were four bodies left in the rubble.
They were there for a long time because there were many bombings and we did not have enough resources.
It was a very dangerous area.
Some were taken out already decomposed after 20 days, when I was still in the hospital,” he recalls.
“There are bodies among the rubble and lying in the street.
No one could come and save them, not the Red Cross, not the Red Crescent... When someone approaches, the occupation forces shoot them.
(…) They do not respect our dead, who are lying there like dogs.
We can't bury them and we don't know what to do.
Some end up being eaten by dogs or animals,” laments Majid Shakur, one of whose brothers, six-year-old Ahmed, was left under the rubble in the southern town of Khan Yunis, the scene of intense Israeli attacks for weeks.
The bodies of two members of the Oroq family remain in rubble since the attack on their house on December 20, they are Asaad Oroq (on the right in the photo), a 45-year-old public employee, and his son Bahaa Oroq (left), a 23-year-old college student who was getting married this summer.
Among the fatalities whose bodies have not been recovered is Professor Refaat Alareer, interviewed by EL PAÍS a few weeks before the Israeli army killed him on December 6 along with a brother, a sister and her four children in the city. from Gaza.
The bombings have damaged a good part of the equipment with which the emergency services work, especially the excavators, “the main tool we have to extract the dead from the rubble,” says Mahmud Bassal.
“It's as if the Israelis are sending us a message not to recover the bodies of our people from down there,” he adds.
War has shaken the vast majority of Gaza's 365 square kilometers.
More than 80% of the population of 2.3 million inhabitants, which suffers damage greater than that of other conflicts such as those in Ukraine, Syria or Iraq, live displaced.
Calculations suggest that at least half of the buildings, between 50% and 61%, are destroyed or damaged by Israeli attacks, according to an analysis published by the BBC based on information obtained via satellite.
“A bombing produces much greater destruction than an earthquake,” says Antonio Nogales, president of United Firefighters Without Borders (BUSF), aware that in the Palestinian enclave it is difficult these days to carry out a systematic rescue and clearing of debris through specialists, something “very delicate.”
With experience in numerous catastrophes, he insists that the first 72 hours are key to rescuing people alive, “but obviously not with shovels, pickaxes, levers and hoes,” which, in addition to hands, is what is most used. these days in Gaza.
Rescue groups like his, he explains, usually use “drilling equipment, hammers and impact drills, bearings, lifting tires… a series of tools that I understand there will be few of and many of them cannot be used because they are electric and They are powered by generators that are fueled with very scarce fuel.
Nogales also alludes to the need for canine units, both to locate living and dead people.
Excavators, an essential tool for the Gaza Civil Defense Corps these days, lack precision and are not usually used when the aim is to free living people.
Some manage to survive the bombings and tell what it was like to be buried.
“The feeling is like being already dead, that no one is going to be able to get to where you are, that no one is going to save you.
But the worst thing is that they take you out and that people are left under the rubble,” says Samaher Badwan, a woman who remembers how she left behind five girls and a boy when they managed to extract her from a five-story building attacked in Deir al Balah, in the middle zone of the Strip.
The true figures of these victims will not be known until after the war, understands the spokesperson for the Civil Defense body.
In the midst of the prevailing chaos, with tens of thousands of families broken by forced displacement and attacks by Israel, Mahmud Bassal and the Gazans cling to one last hope: that the relative they cannot find is still alive somewhere.
In most cases they understand that it will be impossible.
In his testimony, names of families such as the Al Gouls emerge, with 84 dead after the bombing of their five-story building.
“Heartbreaking stories among enormous figures,” deplores Bassal.
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