The search for loved ones in Gaza

0:00You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe-nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story are questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow up first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why. Today on State of the World, the search for loved ones in Gaza.

0:33You'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. I'm Greg Dixon. After more than two years of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the destruction there is overwhelming, with most buildings damaged or destroyed. And many bodies are still buried under the rubble. Crews have begun efforts to recover those bodies, including victims from one of the war's deadliest Israeli attacks in late 2024. NPR investigated that attack on an apartment building in Gaza and mapped a family tree of 132 relatives killed there.

1:13The Israeli military said after the strike it had been targeting a, quote, enemy spotter, but they did not provide any evidence. Survivors waited more than a year before being able to recover some of the bodies of their loved ones. NPR's reporter in Gaza, Anas Baba, witnessed the recovery efforts. And a warning, this story includes graphic descriptions of military strikes and their aftermath. An Israeli drone buzzes over a sea of debris. This all used to be homes. Many collapsed into mass graves. Until now, families have been searching for the bodies of their loved ones with their bare hands. Now, a crew has arrived with a huge orange excavator.

2:06This machine is digging through a mountain of heavy rubble in the destroyed town of Beit Lahya, a five-story apartment building destroyed in an Israeli attack. More than a hundred extended family members crushed inside. Ola Abu Nasr survived. Since the massacre about a year and a half ago, we've been dreaming every day of the moment we could recover the martyrs, honor them, and bury them. Ola documented all the victims from her family, from a 79-year-old grandfather to a six-week-old baby girl. Many of the bodies were recovered from the rubble on the same day of the attack, but other bodies still remain deep under rubble.

2:56Every day we dreamed of the day we could bring them out from under the rubble. Every day we felt as if they were calling us saying, we're here. The UN says more than 80 % of Gaza's buildings were damaged or destroyed during the war. Gaza's civil defense team picked this site to be one of their first recovery efforts. Iyad Abu Jarad is in charge of the crew. Every day, 10 to 15 families call me, he says. They beg for help recovering bodies. But there is only one functioning excavator in Gaza for this kind of work. The Red Cross says, a second excavator was repaired recently. An Israeli security official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told NPR that allowing more heavy machinery into Gaza poses security sensitivities And Israel prevents major rehabilitation efforts until Hamas is disarmed.

3:56The recovery effort here is just the beginning. This is how most of the excavation here in Gaza are going. Slowly, slowly. There is tons and tons of cement that needs to be moved away, which is an overload for the excavator.

4:17When the machine turns off, The gruesome work begins. Twenty rescue workers drop to their knees. They aren't looking with their eyes. They are using their noses, leaning into the cracks, smelling the air to get closer to the corpses. After 90 minutes, they find the first one.

4:44The rescue team just managed to recover the first body. Shouqi Abu Nasr, he's 60 years old and the family members recognized and identified him from his own jacket what we have here is only clothes, bows most of the body is burned and shattered into pieces the crew zips open each body bag for family members to identify the victims It's mostly skeletons inside their clothing. There are no DNA tests here. There is only the survivor's eye. Ola helps with the identification. It's like you're searching for a needle in a haystack. We wait for the moment they say they found someone. Our hearts tighten.

5:39Who could this body be? A huge crowd gathers to watch. But by the end of the day, they only managed to pull four bodies from the debris. The orange excavator stays here overnight, parked on top of the ruins. The next day, the engine roars to life. The excavator digs deeper into the heart of the collapsed building. The crew finds more victims, exactly as they were in the last moments of their life.

6:13The rescue crews just found out another body. And from the clothes we can say that she's a woman. She was sleeping on her mattress, covered in her blanket, red blanket. Oh, my God. The body is with a baby. She's a mother with her baby between her arms. Ola cries as her brother's body is bald from the rubble. Sixteen-year-old Aiman.

6:49His hair is there, his glasses. Oh, God, brother. She identifies him only by his hair and the broken pair of glasses still on his skull. Ola was the one who documented all the names of the victims from the very beginning She spent the last year and a half thinking about the cruelty of her survival That she lived while so many family members died She has a saying The ones who died are the survivors The ones who survived are the dead Better to be dead than to be in pain she says. A pain beyond description. We are like the walking dead. We cry for the dead, and we cry for ourselves. By the end of day two, the crew recovered 20 more skeletons.

7:51It's day three, the final day of the mission. One last chance for the family to find the rest of their loved ones. Ola Abu Nasr is here for a third day in a row. Being a survivor, you become like a madman, searching under the rubble, waiting to see your father or brother, because that person means your entire family. By the time the digger finally stops, the crew recovers 26 more bodies. In total, they found 50 bodies here. But the math remains cruel. Twenty family members are still missing in the rubble. It's too difficult to find them. Ola's father, Muayen Abu Nasr, sits in the ruins. His brother's body wasn't found.

8:40I couldn't say goodbye. I couldn't help, and I feel helpless. My brother has a history, a name. Now the name is gone. The body is gone. His entire family is gone. his wife, daughters, and sons. Only one daughter survived. Digging through the ruins opens up wounds about this entire extended family, nearly wiped out. Another survivor is 29-year-old Aya Abunasar.

9:15My cousins, my aunt's daughters, my uncle's sons and daughters, everyone I love. No one is left, she says. Gaza health officials count more than 73 ,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes. Thousands more are still believed to be missing in the rubble of their homes. I never understood what the word genocide meant until my entire family was killed, all at once, in a single moment, in the blink of an eye, Aya says. Israel denies the accusations of genocide It says its campaign in Gaza was necessary to defeat Hamas after the militant group killed more than 1 ,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023 NPR's investigation of the Israeli strike on the Abu Nasr family home found it was one of the deadliest of the war Satellite imagery shows that weeks after the strike that destroyed the Abu Nasr family building There was more Israeli bombing.

10:20It nearly erased the rest of the neighborhood.

10:26Family members and rescue workers recite prayers at the end of the search effort. They stand in a line next to 50 white body bags lined up on the dirt. Then they go to the cemetery.

10:43The survivors dig new graves and lower into them bags of bones. Bags that weigh almost nothing, but that mean everything to them. You might expect the digging machine to be loaded into a truck and redeployed elsewhere, but it just moves to the collapsed house next door, where another family has been waiting their turn to recover their loved one's skeletons. to finally rest in peace. Anas Babur, NPR News, Northern Gaza.

11:25That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.