The Deadly Long-term Problem Hiding Throughout Gaza

0:00Today on State of the World, the deadly long-term problem hiding throughout Gaza. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories, up close where they're happening. It's Friday, October 31st. I'm Greg Dixon. As Gaza enters the fourth week of a shaky ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, residents are starting to think about what's next. But as Gazans take stock and consider rebuilding, there are lethal remnants of war scattered everywhere. Thousands of unexploded bombs from Israel's military campaign are buried in the soil and rubble and lodged inside the homes that remain.

0:44NPR's Rob Schmitz and Anas Baba report on the dangers they pose and the plans to remove them.

0:53The other boys told me they were buckets of lentils. That's what 8-year-old Jude Ahmad Al-Anger remembers of the container of small black pellets he and his cousins found in the rubble near their tent in Gaza City. His 12-year-old cousin Zane thought the pellets looked like chunks of coal. Maybe they could help start a fire so that their parents could cook dinner, he thought. Whatever it was the boys reasoned, maybe it could help their families in some way. When we brought it back to the tent, says Zane Noor, the adults said, go return that to where you found it. So my cousin tossed it, and it exploded.

1:32Phone video shared with NPR from a family member that was taken immediately after the explosion shows Zayn and Jude staggering from the scene of the blast. Both boys are terrified and covered in blood. Zayn's father, Mohamed Noor, was the first on the scene. The kids went flying through the air, he says. We found each of them in a different place. I found my son hanging on a fence, bleeding. All of them had shrapnel lodged in their bodies, and they were all covered in dust. My son was crying for me.

2:09Zane and Jude now share a bed in a room crowded with other patients at Al-Shifa Hospital. Their hair is covered in dust, and their bodies are blackened by the blast. Dime-sized scabs from the black pellet shrapnel cover nearly every inch of their little bodies. The larger reddish wounds ooze white pus. Jude's scalp was ripped open and sewed shut with rudimentary stitches. Mohamed Noor says when they got to the hospital, it was out of painkillers, and there weren't many doctors to help them. Finally, they found some medicine and were able to clean their wounds, but because there aren't any surgeons left in northern Gaza, he says, they're waiting for operations to remove the rest of the shrapnel from their bodies.

2:53This unexploded bomb they found, says Noor, these are all over the place here in Gaza. We've lost our home and we're afraid to move from one place to another because they're everywhere. The rubble is full of them and they're always exploding. The United Nations Mine Action Service estimates between 5 and 10 percent of weapons fired into Gaza, have failed to detonate, leaving behind unexploded ordnance that have killed at least 328 people, 24 of them since the ceasefire began. We receive daily calls from citizens reporting unexploded bombs, says Mahmoud Basal, spokesman of civil defense in Gaza.

3:30They're in buildings, under buildings, on roofs and on the roads, and these include enormous war missiles, missiles from drones, bombs, the list goes on, he says. He estimates there are tens of thousands of tons of unexploded bombs littered throughout Gaza from this two-year war. The problem is, he says, 90 % of my colleagues capable of defusing these bombs have been killed in Israeli attacks. And that leaves specialists like Nick Orr to clean up this mess, chief of operations for the NGO Humanity and Inclusion in Gaza. He's a former British soldier, bald, with a beard, who's a bit of a perfectionist because he says if he makes a mistake on the job, it's no longer his problem anymore because he's not around anymore.

4:15Despite that... Bombs do not scare me. People scare me. Orr says getting rid of these unexploded bombs is not going to be easy in such a densely populated place like Gaza, where he needs to cordon off and evacuate people each time a bomb is found. We can't hold a cordon or create an evacuation eclipse inside of Gaza. There's 2.4 million people. I would need 800-meter cordon in Gaza City. Can you imagine how that could be achieved right now? With all the will in the world, it's impossible. And that's just for a single bomb, he says. Post-war Gaza is a scenario the world has not seen for decades.

4:54That's biblical. If you look at World War II photographs of Berlin and Paris and London, you know, it's exactly the same thing. As it happens, construction crews in heavily bombed cities in World War II like Berlin still regularly find unexploded ordnance 80 years later. It'll take a similar chunk of time to clear Gaza, he says. You could probably clear the surface in 20 to 30 years, but you're still going to be finding things underground for two to three generations and probably in the fossil record with the amount of contamination that's down there now. Orr says before he and his team can begin to safely clear these bombs from Gaza, there needs to be some kind of internal security force to help move people out of their homes so that the work can be done.

5:38But at the moment, there is no such force. And then I think it's going to be like a patchwork quilt where we'll geographically move to an area. We'll serve an evacuation notice, tell the people, give them opportunity, and then we give them the responsibility to move. But we also got to give them somewhere to move to. And that, says Or, will mean more internally displaced persons camps that Gazans are already all too familiar with. A high-ranking official in the Unexploded Ordnance Division in Gaza, who's not authorized to speak publicly, told NPR that under the U.S.-brokered ceasefire plan, unexploded bombs are being treated as part of the disarmament of Hamas, because Hamas often recycles these bombs to be used against Israel.

6:20As such, this official said Israel's military is targeting anyone who tries to handle Gaza's unexploded bombs. The official told NPR that Israel and Hamas have agreed to allow Egyptian teams to manage the cleanup of Gaza's unexploded ordinance. When asked to confirm all of this with NPR, a spokesperson for Israel's military responded no comment. Back at the El Shifa hospital, Zayn Noor and his cousin Jude say they'll think twice before scavenging amongst the rubble of Gaza for food and other useful items for their families, an activity that has become commonplace among many children in Gaza where more than 64 ,000 children have been killed or injured in the past two years according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

7:05The boys say they've learned their lesson. We're now too scared to go poking around near bombed-out buildings, he says. Little Jude, his face full of scabs and stitches, nods in agreement. Next time, he says, we will stay far, far away. With reporting from Anas Baba in Gaza, I'm Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Tel Aviv.

7:35That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening. Thank you.