61m tonnes of rubble: Gaza aid workers face delicate task of clearing ruins concealing up to 10,000 bodies

It took all day to clear a section of road in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood in Gaza City. At the end of it, Ahmed Alyan, a UN engineer, was exhausted, surrounded by mountains of rubble despite the day’s work.

“I feel as if we are holding a spoon and trying to empty the sea,” Alyan said, beads of sweat trickling down his forehead after a long, hot summer day, reports The Guardian.

Alyan is part of a World Food Programme (WFP) team who have been working on Beirut Street, once a busy main thoroughfare lined with shops, offices and homes and filled with traffic and people. But now it is virtually deserted.

The road was blocked by piles of rubble, stones and the wreckage of destroyed shops. Nearby, a tower stood tilted after some of its concrete foundations were damaged, while displaced families continued to live inside. In some parts of the road, sewage flowed from the ground after the drainage system was damaged and blocked by Israeli bombardment.

The UN estimates that removing the bulk of the rubble in the Gaza Strip could take at least seven to 10 years and cost billions of dollars. That would make the removal of war debris in Gaza one of the largest rubble-clearance operations in modern history.

“The estimate of the total amount of rubble in Gaza is 61m tonnes. It is approximately 20 times the amount of rubble generated in all wars across the world over the last 18 years,” said Jaco Cilliers, the UN Development Programme’s special representative in Palestine.

The task is being carried out in extremely difficult and hazardous conditions. The clearance teams are working in ruins containing countless dead bodies and unexploded bombs. So far, 580km of roads have been cleared, which has in turn made possible the movement of aid trucks, relief teams and residents.

However, the reconstruction of Gaza is a huge challenge facing international and local organisations. After more than two years of work, about 907,000 tonnes of rubble have been removed and more than 300,000 tonnes recycled and reused. But this represents only about 1.5% of the total rubble.

To make things more difficult, the Israeli authorities have banned the necessary equipment from entering Gaza on the grounds that almost any aid that is not food or medicine could be “dual-use” and could somehow benefit Hamas.

Initially, the WFP work was limited to removing debris from the roads and pushing it to the sides to create a passage for trucks. But the sheer quantity was overwhelming, and continuing Israeli bombardment during the nearly year-old ceasefire kept adding to the gargantuan task. Some roads had to be reopened several times.

Meanwhile, the so-called yellow line, a demarcation established at the start of the ceasefire last October, keeps creeping forward as Israeli troops seize more of the territory. The area still accessible to people and aid workers is barely 30% of the whole Gaza Strip, making the problem of what to do with the rubble even more acute.

“One of the ways we have tried to address this problem is by recycling and reusing the rubble in different ways,” Cilliers said.

The UNDP has begun managing five rubble-crushing sites across Gaza, where debris collected from roads and damaged critical infrastructure is processed for reuse. The rubble is first sorted to remove non-concrete materials, including metal and steel rods. The concrete is then crushed into smaller pieces, eventually down to roughly the size of a marble or a very small rock.

UNDP relies on seven crushers across Gaza, all of which were already in the territory before the war. Two of the seven were reconstructed by local engineers in Gaza over the past year, based on models they had available, as they were unable to bring new machinery into the strip.

At one of the crushing sites, a large space that had previously housed UN warehouses, piles of rubble are stacked across the yard. Trucks arriving with large amounts of debris stop on a weighbridge before tipping their cargo on to the piles.

There is a constant roar in the area as the mechanism breaks the concrete into smaller pieces, and the air is thick with dust.

The condition of the machinery poses a big challenge for the teams carrying out the work. Most of the equipment available in Gaza has become severely worn out. The machinery frequently breaks down during operations, partly because of the acute shortage of spare parts, engine oil and other resources needed to maintain and operate it.

With major restrictions on the entry of construction materials still in place, engineers are reusing the crushed rubble for a number of essential purposes. Much of it is used to repair roads and fill potholes, while some is placed beneath tents and shelters to raise them above rainwater and sewage.

Nehal Abu Hassan, a member of the WFP team, said: “These materials cannot be compared with the natural materials normally used to build roads. Their quality is lower, and they are difficult to work with. But there is no alternative. These solutions have been imposed on us by the reality we are living in.”

Removing some of the rubble has already had a big impact. “The road has become wider, the problem of rodents and insects has decreased and cars can pass through more easily,” said Ibrahim Daradona, a displaced man from Jabaliya who is living in the Tel al-Hawa area of Gaza City. “The rubble was even a danger to children playing here.”

More than 2.1 million displaced people are living in tents and temporary shelters, as dire humanitarian conditions persist after nearly three years. Rubble has become part of the environment in which they live every day.

The removal of rubble has also helped revive Gaza’s local economy by creating space for people to start new activities and reopen shops and small businesses. “One of the things we have seen is that when we clear rubble in front of damaged shops and businesses, many of them reopen within around 20 days,” Cilliers said.

Despite all the efforts to remove rubble and restore access to residential areas, the remains of homes carry a particular sensitivity. Every metre of rubble may conceal things that cannot be seen from the outside.

“Rubble in some areas does not represent just debris to people; it represents their entire life and memories. In some cases, there may be bodies still under the rubble. That is why removing it is a very sensitive issue for families and communities,” said Abu Hassan.

The presence of human remains still buried under the rubble remains one of the most urgent humanitarian issues in Gaza. According to estimates cited by the UNDP, between 8,000 and 10,000 bodies may still be buried.

UNDP has said it is working with organisations including the International Committee of the Red Cross to identify locations where human remains may be buried and prioritise them during rubble-removal and recovery operations.

“We are also working on a forensic process to identify remains, [to] ensure that they are handled properly and that religious burial rights are respected, and [to] provide the necessary documentation and certificates for families. This is extremely important for families in Gaza,” Cilliers said.

Unexploded ordnance in rubble and on roads is a serious challenge for teams clearing the debris. UNDP and WFP teams coordinate with the UN mine-clearing arm, Unmas, the British charity the Halo Trust and other organisations before beginning clearance work, to identify unexploded ordnance and protect workers and returning families.

Given the limited capacity to remove explosive ordnance in Gaza, these organisations cannot disarm or remove all unexploded items. But they can identify hazardous areas and mark them.

Alongside the danger from explosives, rubble may contain other hazardous materials, including asbestos, which can pose a serious health risk when its fibres are inhaled.

Partly standing damaged buildings pose another risk. Some families return to their homes believing they are safe, only for the structures to collapse suddenly. Assessing the safety of damaged buildings before residents return is therefore an important part of the recovery process.

“The progress in early recovery is slow, we are trying to do what we can despite the limitations on bringing in the equipment and services we need,” Cilliers said.