It was early in the morning when Mu’ayyad Ajjour and his neighbour Mohamed Zaida set up for the day’s search in Gaza City. Since the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began in October, the two have been looking for the remains of Ajjour’s five-year-old cousin, Masa, under the rubble of the building in which she and family were sheltering.
Ajjour, 37, tied ropes on the handles of a black mixing dish while Zaida, 17, crawled into a deep chasm in the rubble that he had dug. The meagre tools they had at hand were fashioned into a pulley system. This had become their routine: Zaida would pull the bowl down the tunnel on the rope toward him, fill it with debris, then call to Ajjour to pull it out and sift through it using a fan cover.
The air was silent, save for the sounds of the bowl slowly dragging over the rubble. The three-storey building, hit by an airstrike in March 2024, stood lopsided and blown out above Zaida. His makeshift tunnel, held up by stacks of concrete blocks, was unstable and threatened to fall at any moment. But he persisted, hoping to find any sign of the child’s remains.
Masa’s body was just one of thousands thought to be hidden under the rubble of crushed buildings across the strip after two years of war. As the fragile ceasefire holds in Gaza, loved ones are trying to locate them with whatever tools they can find so they can bury them properly.
On Saturday morning, Masa’s mother and both grandfathers received a call from searchers in a panic. They found a skull and some clothes that matched Masa’s description. The remains — a skull with tufts of hair, a ruby red earring still in her ear and a torn up pink sweater — were placed in a white blanket.
“We were surprised when they said they found her body,” Karim Al-Suwaireki, Masa’s maternal grandfather, said after inspecting her remains. “Thank God we identified Masa.”
Ajjour, who had been part of the search party, said the scene would have made stones cry as he celebrated finding the little girl and finally being able to give her a proper burial.
Thousands under rubble
In March 2024, Masa and her family were sheltering in a residential building when it was raided, then bombed, the men told CBC’s freelance videographer Mohamed El Saife. Masa, her father and mother were shot, they said.
The whereabouts of her father, who was shot three times, are unknown. Her mother, who was pregnant at the time, is recovering from injuries nearby at Al-Shifa Hospital. The baby did not survive.
Masa hadn’t been seen since then, and Ajjour and Zaida suspected her body was under the rubble.
“We are looking for anything…. A skull, a backbone or a pelvis,” Zaida said earlier this week. “This is what survives after a year and a half.”
The two said they have worked in the area from seven in the morning until sunset every day. Before Masa’s remains were found, they had made little progress, which they said was because they lacked the proper tools.
“The only distance we’ve gone is seven metres,” Ajjour said.
Using the fan lid, Ajjour sifted through the latest pile of rubble Zaida had sent back to him, slowly revealing a white patent leather shoe. He took a moment to look at it, turning it over in his hand, as he realized it might have belonged to Masa.
“Hammood, where did you get this from? Focus on the same area,” he called to Zaida, using a nickname for him.
Ajjour wiped dust off the shoe’s sole and placed it on the edge of a cement block that once held up the building in front of him.
“This gives us hope to look,” he said, “not to stop and not to lose hope.”
Aid, heavy machinery not getting in
At least 11,000 bodies are estimated to still be buried under the rubble across Gaza, the United Nations said in April. At the time, airstrikes had halted waste and debris removal operations.
The war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when a Hamas-led attack killed some 1,200 people in Israel and took another 250 hostage. Israel’s subsequent military offensive in Gaza has killed more than 69,000 Palestinians and destroyed much of the enclave.
Last month, the UN Development Program began removing rubble in Gaza City, aiming to restore access to essential services. It said diggers and other vehicles have been deployed to Al-Jala street to work around the clock to reopen roads. Given that an estimated 55 million to 60 million tonnes of rubble remain, it may take years to complete, the organization said.
In a post to its WhatsApp group on Thursday, the Gaza Health Ministry said many bodies still remain under the rubble, though it did not provide a specific estimate. It said people reported hearing sounds from under the ruins but that ambulance and civil defence teams still couldn’t reach the victims.
Back in Gaza City, at the end of the day, Zaida crawled out of the tunnel. The two sat on a nearby ledge, dripping in sweat and covered in dust, examining the white shoe.
“I don’t want anything. I don’t want clothes or anything,” Ajjour said. “I just want to bury the child based on God’s decree. The girl was five years old. What did she do wrong? What did she do to deserve being under a building, three floors?”
Two days later, Ajjour was standing over the remains of Masa, wiping sweat off his forehead. The search was finally over for the little girl — another victim of the war. His thoughts went to Masa’s father, who is still missing.
“We will bury her by God’s decree, and we will continue searching for her father,” he said. “We hope we won’t find him [here] and that he’s with the other side.”
