Extract from ABC News
Crouching amid a pile of rubble that used to be his Gaza home, Mahmoud Hammad scoops dirt into a large sieve and shakes it, looking carefully before dumping it out.
Warning: This story contains graphic content that some readers may find disturbing.
In recent days, tiny bones have appeared.
Mr Hammad believes they belong to the unborn girl his pregnant wife was carrying when an Israeli air strike hit the family's building more than two years ago, killing his wife and their five children.
He adds the fragments to a box of bones he has collected during months of burrowing into the wreckage on his own, using picks, shovels and his hands.
"I won't find them all," Mr Hammad said.
Some 8,000 people remain buried under the rubble of their homes that were destroyed by Israel's bombardment during its campaign against Hamas, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
While air strikes and ground assaults raged, retrieving most was out of the question. But since a ceasefire deal in October, efforts to dig them out have increased, although it has been hampered by a lack of heavy equipment.
Mahmoud Hammad is searching for the remains of his family. (Supplied: AAP)
Wife returned despite shelling
Mr Hammad said at about 11:30am on December 6, 2023, an Israeli strike smashed into the six-storey building where his and his brother's families lived in Gaza City's Sabra neighbourhood.
Mr Hammad said he had just stepped out of the apartment to go upstairs as his wife, Nema, who was nine months pregnant, and their five children, aged 8 to 16, were finishing breakfast.
In the days leading to the strike, the Israeli military had dropped leaflets over the area, ordering people to leave and head to the southern half of the strip. But Mr Hammad said he refused to leave.
Mr Hammad said his wife had taken the children to her parents' home in the nearby Jabaliya district, while he stayed behind.
But Mr Hammad said his wife wanted to come back despite the bombardment. On December 5, he said, he found his wife and kids at his door.
Mr Hammad said his wife told him: "Either we live together or we are martyred together."
"They were martyred, and I survived," he said.
His brother, sister-in-law and their four sons were also killed.
Mr Hammad said he was taken to a nearby clinic with multiple injuries, including fractures in the chest, pelvis, knee and internal chest bleeding.
After the strike, neighbours were able to recover the body of his eldest son, Ismail, and two of his brother's children, he said.
The rest remained under the rubble.
Digging through his home
Mr Hammad said after recovering from his wounds, he returned to his home's ruins and set up a shelter nearby to live in.
"I stayed with them, my wife and children, in the rubble,"he said.
"Every day, I am talking to them. Their scent lingered, and I felt a deep connection with them."
He then began the search for their bodies. Mr Hammad said he first sought help from Gaza's Civil Defense corps.
But, he said, rescue teams never came, either because it was too dangerous amid intense Israeli bombing or because they did not have the equipment and machinery to remove the rubble.
So, Mr Hammad said, he started digging himself. He began with the collapsed ceilings and walls, breaking them into small stones and putting them in sacks. Piles of dozens of sacks now surround the site like a wall.
Mr Hammad said that in March 2024, he found some remains that he believed were of his family.
"There were simple bones covered with flesh … some of which had been eaten by animals," he said.
Mahmoud Hammad's relatives help search for his wife's remains, still buried beneath the rubble of their home. (AP: Jehad Alshrafi)
Mr Hammad said that in late 2024, he had dug down to his brother's apartment, which had been on the third floor, where he found the bodies of his brother and sister-in-law.
He buried them in a temporary graveyard that residents of the area created during the war to hold their dead until they could be moved to a proper cemetery.
Once Mr Hammad resumed digging, he said he drove down 9 metres, finally reaching his own apartment, which had been on the ground floor.
Mr Hammad said he was now focused on clearing rubble from the eastern side because his wife was there in her last moments.
"They were eating rice pudding in the living room,"he said.
Mr Hammad said he shared images of the bones through the online messaging service, WhatsApp, with a doctor who said the fragments, which included a jawbone, appeared to be for a small baby.
Fragments of bone have been found in searching for the remains of Nema Hammad, whose home was destroyed in 2023. (AP: Jehad Alshrafi)
He believes it is the remains of their unborn child — the baby girl they had been waiting for.
Mr Hammad said they had planned to name her Haifa, after one of his sisters-in-law who was killed by an Israeli strike just a few weeks before the one on their home.
"All the baby's clothes, a crib, and a room were prepared, and everyone at home was waiting for her arrival," he said.
He said discovering the bone fragments had brought him hope.
"There's a clue that I'm reaching my wife and other children,"Mr Hammad said.
He said once he collected enough remains, he would give them a proper burial.
61 million tonnes of rubble
More than 700 bodies have been recovered from under buildings since the ceasefire began, Zaher al-Waheidi, head of the Health Ministry's records department, told The Associated Press.
Each is added to a list of the dead from the war — now more than 72,000, according to the ministry, part of the Hamas-led government that maintains detailed casualty records seen as generally reliable by UN agencies and independent experts, although it does not give a breakdown of civilians and militants.
The war began after Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostage.
Israeli bombardment destroyed or damaged 81 per cent of the strip's 250,000 buildings, including schools, hospitals and private houses, according to the UN's satellite imagery analysis unit.
It has left Gaza as one of the most devastated places on earth with 61 million tons of rubble — about as much as 15 Great Pyramids of Giza or 25 Eiffel Towers by volume, according to the UN.
Digging out has been made more difficult by the lack of bulldozers and heavy equipment, which Israel often bans from entering Gaza.
Gaza is a nightmare, but once it was a dream.
Rescue work remains impossible in the more than 50 per cent of the Gaza Strip that remains under Israeli military control.
There, the military has been systematically blowing up and bulldozing buildings, further reducing the possibility of finding any bodies lost inside.
About two months ago, the UN and the Red Cross coordinated the entry of an excavator for the civil defence, said Karem al-Dalu, a worker for the group.
"But that's not enough," Mr al-Dalu said.
He spoke as he and other rescue workers cleared the rubble of a building in Gaza City's Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, using the new excavator.
Gaza's civil defence teams have been working to recover the remains of the Abu Nada family. (AP: Jehad Alshrafi)
The building was levelled by an air strike on December 11, 2023, with about 120 people inside, said Rafiq Abdel-Khaleq Salem, whose immediate family was among those sheltering there.
"Their only crime was that they didn't leave, so they flattened the building over them,"he said.
In the days following the strike, 66 bodies were recovered, he said. Another 54 people remained buried under the rubble.
Rescue workers were finally able to come back to the site over the weekend. They managed to find 27 more bodies, but the rest remain missing, including Salem's wife and their four children.
"It is a painful feeling," he said. "I hoped to find my wife and children to bury them in graves and visit them."
ABC/AP
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