For 200 days, Abu Ismail Hammad has been digging beneath his home in Gaza City, painstakingly collecting the remains of his wife and unborn child. He has been using a flour sifter to find their bone fragments hidden in the sand.
His entire family was killed just under two months into Israel’s genocidal assault, when an airstrike hit their home in the Sabra neighborhood on December 6, 2023. His five children—Ismail, Mohammed, Ghaith, Jana, and Joudi—aged between eight to 16 years old, were all killed, along with his wife, Naama Alaa Al-Din Hammad. Naama was nine months pregnant with their sixth child, a girl they were planning to name Haifa, after her martyred aunt. His brother, sister-in-law and all of their children were also killed.
Hammad had left the apartment to go upstairs to another floor just 15 minutes before the strike. He was badly injured in the attack. Hammad was the sole survivor.
Wounded and displaced, and with the war raging, it took him a year before he was able to return, at the end of 2024, to begin trying to recover their bodies. After a few weeks, he was forced to stop again as Israel’s assault in the area intensified again. In November, soon after the so-called ceasefire went into effect, Hammad returned once more to find them.
He showed Drop Site pictures of them all together, smiling before the war, their faces slightly distorted by his heavily cracked phone screen.
Hammad spent weeks clearing away tons of rubble and then began to dig. “I was able to recover my brother, his wife, and their children. When I reached the living room in my home, it became clear that it was completely burned. I realized that the fate of my children was unknown—that they were burned and their bones had melted away. I then went to the room where my wife had been and I found her bones,” Hammad told Drop Site News. “How did I know it was my wife? First, the location of the room. Second, the bones of the unborn child were found in the same place, because the pregnancy was complete.”
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