After 15 months of war, Hani al-Dibs, a high-school teacher, thought his greatest wish was to see the bombardment of Gaza come to an end. But the long-awaited cease-fire has brought only bitterness and dread.
Mr. al-Dibs is one of countless Gazans burdened with an agonizing duty: trying to recover the remains of loved ones trapped beneath the swathes of rubble left by Israel’s war against Hamas.
Some families have returned home to find corpses of loved ones so decomposed, they cannot tell them apart. Others cannot even enter the wreckage to dig, so strong is the stench of human decay. And some have searched and searched, only to find nothing at all.
As they prepared to return to their hometown, Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, Mr. al-Dibs’s two surviving children kept asking him whether their mother and little brothers might somehow have survived the blast that had trapped their bodies for three months beneath the rubble of the family home.
“They’d ask: What if they were still sleeping after the explosion, and climbed out later? What if, later on, the Israelis heard them screaming, and got them out?” he said in an interview. “Their questions torment me.”
Gazan health authorities have tallied nearly 48,000 among the dead, without distinguishing between civilians and combatants.
