Report from Jerusalem

At some funerals held in Gaza over the past 15 months, mourners placed a bright orange jacket over the body.
The jackets are usually well worn, showing dust, and sometimes blood. They belong to Civil Defense, Gaza’s main emergency service.
Throughout the Israeli bombing, the Civil Defense was responsible for extracting the living and the dead from under the rubble. Along with the Gaza Ambulance Service, rescue workers carried out some of the most harrowing actions in the Strip.
They paid a heavy price. On the first full day of peace on Monday, the agency said 99 of its rescue workers were killed and 319 injured, some with life-changing injuries.
When Civil Defense buries their bodies, where possible, death jackets are placed over their bodies.
“We put the jacket there because our colleague sacrificed his life in it,” Noah Al-Shaghnoubi, a 24-year-old rescue worker, said in a phone interview from Gaza City.
“We hope that God will show that this man did good in his life, and that he saved others.”

Israel has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians in Gaza during the conflict — most of them women and children — and injured more than 111,000, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, whose figures the United Nations considers reliable. A recent study published in the Lancet medical journal found that the death toll during the first nine months of the war may have been underestimated by more than 40%.
The fragile ceasefire that took effect last weekend is still holding. But for Civil Defense rescuers, the next phase of their work is just beginning.
The agency estimates that there are more than 10,000 people buried under the massive sea of rubble across Gaza. This figure is based on information collected throughout the war about the people who were in every building destroyed by Israel, and who the agency knows have already been recovered.
In areas completely occupied by Israeli forces during the destruction, they do not have detailed information and rely on residents to help them. On Tuesday, in the Tal Al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City, Al-Shaghnoubi rescue worker found a man carrying information about the fate of a destroyed residential building.
Al-Shaghnoubi said: “He told us that seven dead people were recovered, but there was an elderly man, a child and an infant.”
“Fortunately there was a privately owned bulldozer nearby and we were able to extract the top layer of rubble,” he said. “Underneath we found three skeletons matching the description.”

Chagnoubi gained a large following during the war by sharing his experiences on social media. Although he has pixelated some of the images, others show the horrors he and other young rescue workers faced.
One video shows him under the rubble, carefully removing the body of an infant from around the still-living body of another young child. Other photos he sent to the BBC show the extreme nature of the rescue work.
“You have to get numb over time,” Al-Shaghnobi said during a work shift in Gaza City. “But my condition has become worse. I feel more pain, not less. I find it difficult to cope. I saw 50 of my colleagues die in front of me. Who can imagine this outside Gaza?”
With the release of the first Israeli hostages from Gaza last week, in exchange for 90 Palestinians from Israeli prisons, the Israeli authorities described the intensive psychological support that awaits the returning hostages.
But for those suffering from atrocities in Gaza, this support is extremely limited. None of the four rescue workers who spoke to the BBC this week from Gaza said they had received advice.
“We all need this, but no one is talking about it,” said Mohammed Lafi, a 25-year-old rescue worker in Gaza City.
Lavi, who has been with the agency for six years, has a wife and infant son at home. “When I remove the body of a child from under the rubble, I scream to myself if he is the same age as my son. My body is shaking.”

Abdullah Al-Majdalawi, a 24-year-old civil defense worker who lives with his parents in Gaza City, said that even if counseling were widely available, “a year of treatment would not be enough for one day in this job.”
Al-Majdalawi said that when he returned home between shifts, he would constantly do small jobs and household chores, “because I became afraid of my memories.”
“I’m so lonely right now,” he said. “I don’t really talk to others about what I saw. But I feel like my whole body is tight, and I need some kind of treatment because things are piling up.”
Al-Majdalawi said that civil defense workers have become seen as heroes from abroad. “But they don’t see what’s happening inside. Inside I’m waging a war against myself.”
With the start of the ceasefire, new images from inside Gaza showed scenes of almost complete destruction, especially in the northern Gaza Strip. Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said that the agency hopes to recover the rest of the dead from under the rubble within 100 days, but he admitted that it was a difficult goal, because they do not actually have bulldozers and other heavy equipment yet.
The Civil Defense accused Israel of deliberately targeting and destroying its vehicles and equipment in air strikes, something Israel denies. Rescue workers told the BBC they were currently working with simple hand tools such as hammers, and had a small number of operational vehicles. Al-Majdalawi said: “We have very little equipment and we need another civil defense to save the civil defense.”
An agency spokesman said on Friday that they had been able to recover only 162 bodies since the ceasefire began about a week ago.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Aid (OCHA) warned that recovering the bodies could take years, due to a lack of equipment and personnel, an estimated 37 million tons of rubble strewn with unexploded bombs and hazardous materials such as asbestos.
The amount of time spent by many of the dead also hampers the identification process. At the European Hospital in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, people were searching this week for their loved ones among the remains that were brought to the hospital and placed outside on white sheets. In many cases, the only option was to search for shoes, clothing or other personal effects.
Ali Ashour, a university professor, said of his 18-year-old son Mahjoub: “I think I will recognize my son immediately, even if his face is featureless and he is just a skeleton.”
“I will get to know him because I am his father and I know him better than a million people,” he said.
He added that Ashour still hoped that Mahjoud had been captured, but he planned to search the dead every day until he knew that. “Anytime they bring more remains, I’ll come,” he said. “And if I see my son, I will take him out from among the bodies and carry him away.”
Nisreen Shaaban was looking for her 16-year-old son Moatasem, who she said left their home in Beit Hanoun for 15 minutes and never returned.
“I opened every shroud here, looking for the clothes he was wearing, trying to smell him,” she said. It was surrounded by human remains. “I feel like I’m living in a cemetery,” she said. “It’s a city of horrors.”
The Civil Defense Agency estimates that nearly 3,000 people may have been burned in the bombing, depriving some families of ending their search. But there are many who still need to recover.
“These people need to be found and honored,” said Al-Shaghnoubi, the rescue worker. “This work is waiting for us. All we need is the equipment and we will do it.”
Moaz Al-Khatib and Amr Ahmed Tabsh contributed to this report.
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