Looking down at her father’s body wrapped in a shroud outside Nasser Hospital in Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis, a little girl wailed: “Daddy … Why did you leave us?”
All around her, rows of body bags lay on the ground in the footage filmed by an NBC News crew Thursday. Families gathered around, mourning over their loved ones whose remains were pulled from the rubble of homes and buildings toppled during Israel’s military offensive in the Palestinian enclave.
In the six days since a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas came into effect, hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have made their way back to their old homes. Many have found nothing more than rubble where their neighborhoods once stood.
Israel launched its deadly offensive in the enclave following the Hamas-led attacks Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 and saw around 250 people taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies, an assault that marked a major escalation in a decadeslong conflict.
Since then, more than 47,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip, according to health officials in the enclave.
But Palestinian officials, the United Nations and aid agencies have warned that the death toll is likely to be much higher once bodies buried in the rubble are taken into account, although some may never be recovered.
The bodies of 162 people have already been found in different parts of the enclave since Sunday’s ceasefire came into effect, Gaza’s Civil Defense Agency said in a statement published to Telegram on Thursday.
It is feared that the “bodies of thousands” of people are still buried under rubble, the statement said, adding that crews faced difficulties in finding and recovering them because of a lack of resources, including a lack of “heavy equipment and machinery.”
Outside Nasser Hospital, some of the body bags had names and details of the dead written on them. Others were left bare.
“No one was able to reach them due to the shelling,” Ismael Hussein Abou Reeda told NBC News. Once the ceasefire came into effect, Reeda from Khuza’a, a village in the Khan Younis governorate near Israel’s border, said people started searching for their “loved ones.”
Further south in the city of Rafah, drone video captured by NBC News’ crew earlier this week showed widespread devastation, with homes reduced to rubble for miles.
As he returned to search for his home in the city, Walid Abu Libdeh, a 61-year-old engineer, told an NBC News crew on Wednesday that the level of destruction resembled that of “Hiroshima or Nagasaki,” the Japanese cities destroyed by American atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
“Where are the houses? Where are the trees? Where are the animals? Where are the people we love?” he said.
