14/02/2026
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — 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.
In recent days, he was lucky. Tiny bones appeared.
He believes they belong to the unborn girl his pregnant wife was carrying when an Israeli airstrike hit the family’s building more than two years ago, killing his wife and their five children.
He added 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,” he said.
Some 8,000 people remain buried under the rubble of their homes destroyed by Israel’s bombardment during its campaign against Hamas, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. While airstrikes 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, though hampered by the lack of heavy equipment.
