With Fighting Stilled, Gazans Face New Trauma: Searching for Their Dead

 

  "Relatives arrived, eager to help. But with Israel’s punishing siege still blocking new equipment from entering the enclave, no one had drills or other power tools to break through the rubble.

“We used what we could find: shovels, picks and our bare hands,” he said.

After hours of digging, they finally reached the flattened floor where his family had lived.

Mr. al-Dibs found parts of a skeleton that he believed belonged to his son Hasib, who was 8. But he could find nothing of his wife and 6-year-old Habib — only a few charred fragments of bone that crumbled as he tried to grasp them between his fingers.

An Al Jazeera television segment filming retrieval efforts in the neighborhood caught on camera Mr. al-Dib’s realization that he would never find their bodies. Trembling with fury, he shook out some white plastic body bags.

“I brought big shrouds! And little shrouds! So I could put their bodies inside! But I found their bodies reduced to ashes!” he screamed.

Then, as his 12-year-old daughter Fatima, in a bright yellow jacket, ran up to the ruins, sobbing and calling out the names of her younger brothers, Mr. al-Dibs gently pulled her away: “Oh Habib! Oh Hasib! Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”

“They were deprived of a last goodbye,” Mr. al-Dibs said."

more in the report by Erika Solomon
Aaron Boxerman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad

With Fighting Stilled, Gazans Face New Trauma: Searching for Their Dead – DNyuz