Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of human remains.
BEIT LAHIA, Gaza Strip — A drone hums over a broad field of shattered concrete and twisted metal in northern Gaza, where entire families were buried beneath the wreckage of their homes.
This was the site of one of the deadliest strikes in the Gaza war, the collapse of a five-story apartment building in late October 2024 that, an NPR investigation found, killed more than 132 members of the extended Abu Naser family who had been sheltering there. Over three days, Gaza Civil Defense and volunteers carried out a painstaking recovery mission to reach the bodies entombed under the debris.
“We have been waiting every day to recover the martyrs, to honor them and bury them,” said survivor Ola Abu Naser, describing the long months of wanting to bring her relatives home. “Every day we felt they were calling us.”
A single excavator for a vast need
Gaza’s health ministry estimates roughly 8,000 bodies remain trapped beneath rubble across the territory. Yet recovery teams have very limited heavy equipment. The International Committee of the Red Cross told NPR there is only one functioning excavator available for body recovery in Gaza; a second had just been repaired and was due to be put to use.
“It’s an overwhelming need. One excavator is simply not enough,” a Red Cross spokesman said.
Israeli restrictions have delayed larger-scale rehabilitation and the movement of machinery into Gaza. An Israeli security official, speaking anonymously about the policy, said that heavy equipment has security sensitivities and could be repurposed for military uses — an explanation offered for limiting such machinery until Hamas is disarmed.
Scent and sight in the search
The recovery team chose this collapsed apartment block in northern Beit Lahia for one of its first major digs in the area. With the excavator removing large slabs of concrete and tangled rebar, the human work began: rescue workers dropping to their knees, searching closely through pockets and fissures in the wreckage.
They relied on scent as much as sight — leaning into openings and following smells to narrow where remains lay. After about an hour and a half they located the first person: 60-year-old Shawqi Abu Naser, identified by his jacket. What remained were clothing and bones.
Nearly 18 months after the strike, many victims had been reduced to skeletal remains inside their clothes. With no DNA testing available in Gaza, identifications depend largely on survivors recognizing clothing, personal items or physical features.
“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Ola said of the waits between discoveries. “When they say they have found someone, our hearts tighten: who could this be?”
By the close of the first day, four bodies had been recovered and the heavy machinery sat atop the ruins overnight.
Final positions and the burden of surviving
On day two the excavator dug deeper into the building’s heart. Workers found people in the positions they had been in during their final moments: a mother still on a mattress beneath a red blanket, clutching an infant; a young man whose hair and broken eyeglasses allowed relatives to recognize him — Ola’s 16-year-old brother, Imad.
Ola, one of the few members of her family who survived, had spent the previous year and a half compiling an account of every relative who died, from an elderly grandfather to a six-week-old baby girl. The loss left survivors living with a different kind of death.
“The ones who died are at rest. The ones who survived are the walking dead,” she said. “Better to be dead than to be in this pain. We cry for the dead and we cry for ourselves.”
By the end of the second day the team had recovered 20 additional skeletons.
Incomplete recoveries and vanished names
On the third day the crew recovered 26 more bodies, bringing the total from the three-day operation to 50. Yet the toll remained cruel: roughly 20 members of the extended Abu Naser family were still unaccounted for in the most inaccessible sections of the rubble.
Moeen Abu Naser, 54, sat amid the ruins while crews worked. He said one brother was not among the recovered. “I couldn’t say goodbye; I couldn’t help. I feel helpless,” Moeen said. “My brother had a name, a history. Now the name is gone, the body is gone.”
For Aya Abu Naser, 29, the dig reopened wounds created when nearly all of her relatives were killed at once. “Everyone I love… no one is left,” she said. “I didn’t understand the meaning of genocide until my whole family was killed in a single moment.”
Context and consequences
Gaza health officials report more than 73,000 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks during the war. Israel rejects the label of genocide and says its campaign is aimed at defeating Hamas, which carried out the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel. At the time the Abu Naser building was struck, the Israeli military said it was targeting an “enemy spotter” reported on the roof, though it did not release photographic evidence to support that claim.
Satellite imagery analyzed after the strike shows the neighborhood sustained heavy bombardment in the ensuing weeks, further erasing what remained of the area.
Bags of bones, graves and prayers
When the last bodies were taken from the ruins, family members and rescuers stood in silence and recited prayers behind rows of white body bags laid out on the ground. Survivors then walked to a nearby cemetery, dug shallow graves and lowered into them sacks containing mostly skeletal remains — fragile, light bundles that nonetheless allowed families to bury loved ones and say a final prayer.
As the excavator moved to the collapsed building next door, other relatives waited for their turn, hoping to recover remains so the dead could finally rest and the living could begin to grieve with a measure of closure.
NPR’s Daniel Estrin contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, Israel.