On the 45th day of the bombing of Gaza, eight-year-old Waseem Abedrabou and his father Husam, left the family home for a night to stay with Husam’s mother.
“[His mother Abeer] doesn’t let Waseem sleep a metre away from her, but she let him sleep in that house that day,” said Dina Safi, Waseem’s aunt. “Husam wanted to see his family and Waseem wanted to see his grandma.”
Abeer would never see either of them again. An Israeli airstrike hit the house Waseem and Husam were staying in, devastating the large home, which housed five units of their extended family in Nuseirat refugee camp – south of the point in Gaza where the enclave’s population were ordered to evacuate.
Waseem’s uncle pulled the boy’s lifeless body from the rubble and carried him to his mother. But Husam’s body was buried beneath tonnes of heavy concrete.
Safi said Abeer screamed and collapsed when her son was brought to her, wrapped in a shroud, but she has been unable to process her pain because she does not know the fate of her husband, who still has not been found after days of digging.
Safi described her nephew as a child genius with an interest in Lego and computers inspired by his father’s work as an electrical engineer. He had won chess and engineering competitions at school and had shared with his mother his worries about losing his trophies if their home they left in Gaza City was bombed.
“I don’t want him to be a number, Waseem’s eyes were full of dreams,” she says.
Alongside the almost 15,000 people, including more than 6,000 children, killed in Gaza since 7 October, the Palestinian health ministry has reported another 6,000 Palestinians believed trapped under the rubble.
The lack of fuel caused by Israel’s siege of Gaza has limited the ability to recover the bodies. Emergency services lack the capacity to access sites to rescue people while communications blackouts have made it hard for people to report the sites of airstrikes.
Hopes for better access to the worst-affected areas have not materialised, despite the truce that began on Friday, after a deal in which Hamas released some hostages in exchange for Israel freeing imprisoned Palestinian women and children.
Nebal Farsakh, spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, said they could only access the north of Gaza to evacuate patients from its now-defunct hospitals or search for people in destroyed buildings, through coordination with the UN.
“We are completely denied access to many areas in Gaza City. We were expected in these four days to at least transport the dead bodies in the street because dozens of people killed have been in the streets for almost two weeks. Unfortunately, this is not the case,” said Farsakh. “We can’t even help by going to these areas to transfer the injured to hospital, or even transfer the dead bodies or rescue those trapped under the rubble.”
James Elder, a spokesperson for the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, said after visiting Gaza on Friday, as the four-day ceasefire began, that the enclave looked like a “hellscape”.
He said people who had left northern Gaza had described a landscape of “devastated buildings, of twisted steel, of crumbling concrete”. Most believed there was nothing to return to in Gaza City or other northern towns, but there were many whose only aim during the truce was to search in the rubble for their relatives, he said.
“There’s a palpable sense in the air of tension and sorrow. Shattered walls and broken windows. The collective darkness of this war’s relentless assault on children,” he said.
“I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen this many children with wounds of war in this short space of time – children who looked like their bodies have been broken and badly been put back together.”
Airwars, a London-based charity that monitors civilian casualties, said many reports it had received included significant numbers of unidentified people under the rubble.
“We’re bracing for news of further casualties that can be linked to strikes even six weeks ago, as rescue efforts have been challenged by the lack of fuel and proper equipment. In some cases, we’ve seen reports of individuals searching through rubble with their bare hands, trying to find survivors,” said Emily Tripp, director of Airwars.
The airstrike in Nuseirat that killed Waseem confirmed the worst fears of his aunt, Alaa, who lives in the UK and had been trying to get the family out of Gaza.
Even though her parents have spent their careers working for the UN Relief and Works Agency , she hasn’t been able to get them on an evacuation list out of Gaza.
“I had a hope we’d get out of it and we’d look back and have painful stories but wouldn’t be scarred,” she said. “But this has scarred us for life.”
