Gaza Herald — The Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared has appealed to the international community to urgently deploy specialized teams and equipment to Gaza to help recover the bodies of thousands of Palestinians killed under the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, as well as to identify the victims and ensure they are buried with dignity.
In a statement issued Saturday, the center stressed that immediate action is needed, especially after U.S. President Donald Trump publicly urged Israel to halt its bombardment of Gaza in preparation for implementing his plan to end the war following Hamas’s position on a potential agreement.
Local authorities in Gaza, the center explained, lack the capacity to deal with tens of thousands of tons of rubble left by two years of nonstop Israeli air raids. The destruction of civil defense infrastructure and the shortage of technical equipment required for search, rescue, and recovery operations have left thousands of families in anguish.
The rights center estimated that between eight and nine thousand Palestinians remain missing, the majority believed to be buried beneath collapsed buildings or trapped in areas overtaken by Israeli forces in northern, central, and southern Gaza.
It emphasized that this represents an open-ended humanitarian tragedy that cannot be addressed without urgent international intervention under the supervision of the United Nations and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent. The center called for the provision of heavy machinery, rescue teams, forensic experts, and DNA identification technologies to help families reclaim and bury their loved ones.
The appeal also underscored the need to uphold religious and humanitarian traditions, as well as obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention and its Additional Protocol, which require warring parties to search for, recover, and identify the dead.
The statement warned that Israel’s ongoing bombardment, even after Trump’s call for a ceasefire to facilitate his plan for hostage releases, is directly obstructing humanitarian efforts to recover bodies and increasing the likelihood of more civilian deaths under the rubble or in besieged areas.
The center urged the international community, the United Nations, and the International Committee of the Red Cross to act immediately to bring debris-removal machinery and identification technologies into Gaza, and to secure an immediate halt to Israeli attacks to establish safe corridors for both local and international rescue teams.
It concluded by warning that the silence of the international community in the face of this escalating disaster amounts to abandoning the most basic principles of humanity and condemns thousands of Palestinian families to enduring both loss and open-ended suffering.
