Editor's note: This story contains descriptions of human remains.
BEIT LAHIA, Gaza Strip — An Israeli drone buzzes over a sea of debris in northern Gaza, where homes were turned into mass graves.
This is where a recovery crew has carried out one of its first missions to unearth bodies buried deep under rubble — at the site of one of the deadliest Israeli strikes of the Gaza war.
The strike destroyed a five-story apartment building in late October 2024, killing more than 132 members of the extended Abu Naser family sheltering inside, an NPR investigation documented.
"We've been dreaming every day of the moment we could recover the martyrs, honor them, and bury them," said Ola Abu Naser, a 30-year-old survivor. "Every day we felt as if they were calling us, saying: 'We are here.'"
About 8,000 bodies are believed to still be buried under debris throughout Gaza, according to Gaza's health ministry.
NPR documented the three-day recovery mission at the site of the Abu Naser family massacre.
Only one digger to recover bodies in Gaza
Gaza's Civil Defense team selected this site as their first major recovery effort in the north, one of the parts of the territory most devastated by Israeli bombardment.
Iyad Abu Jarad, who oversees the crew, said he receives 10 to 15 phone calls a day from desperate families begging for help recovering the remains of their loved ones.
But there is only one functioning excavator in Gaza available for body recoveries, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
"The scale of the need is so high. One functioning excavator is simply not enough," said Pat Griffiths, a Red Cross spokesman. He said a second digging machine was recently repaired and will be put to use in the coming weeks.
Israel is preventing major rehabilitation efforts until Hamas is disarmed.
"Machinery like that has different sensitivities, including security ones. I don't think that we need an exaggerated mind or imagination to understand why these things can serve other purposes," said an Israeli security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the policy.
Following the scent of corpses
The machinery lifts heavy pieces of concrete and rebar. When the engine shuts off, the gruesome work begins.
Twenty rescue workers drop to their knees. They aren't looking with their eyes. They're using their noses, leaning into the cracks and smelling the air to get closer to the corpses.
After 90 minutes, they find the first one: 60-year-old Shawqi Abu Naser. Family members identify him from his jacket. He is only clothes and bones.
Nearly a year and a half after their deaths, the victims are mostly skeletons inside their clothing.
There are no DNA tests in Gaza. There is only the survivor's eye.
"It's like you're searching for a needle in a haystack," said Ola Abu Naser. "We wait for the moment they say they found someone. Our hearts tighten: who could this body be?"
By the end of the first day, the crew pulls just four bodies from the ruins. The orange excavator remains parked atop the debris overnight.
"The ones who survived are the dead"
On day two, the excavator digs deeper into the heart of the collapsed building.
More victims are found exactly as they were in their final moments of life.
Rescue workers uncover the body of a mother on a mattress beneath a red blanket, holding a baby in her arms.
A young man's body is pulled from the wreckage. Ola Abu Naser cries out. It is her 16-year-old brother, Imad.
"His hair is there, and his glasses. Oh God, brother," she cries, identifying him only by his hair and a broken pair of glasses still resting on his skull.
Ola, one of the few survivors, spent the last year and a half meticulously documenting all the victims from her family, from a 79-year-old grandfather to a six-week-old baby girl.
She reflects on the cruelty of her own survival, that she lived while so many of her family members died.
"The ones who died are the survivors. The ones who survived are the dead," Ola said. "Better to be dead than to be in pain, a pain beyond description. They're at rest. We're like the walking dead. We cry for the dead, and we cry for ourselves."
By the end of day two, 20 more skeletons are recovered.
Some bodies were not found
On the third and final day of the mission, the team recovers 26 more bodies.
In total, 50 bodies were found. But the math remains cruel. Twenty family members are still missing in the rubble, too difficult to reach.
Moeen Abu Naser, Ola's 54-year-old father, sits quietly in the ruins. His brother's body was not among the recovered.
"I couldn't say goodbye, I couldn't help, and I feel helpless," said Moeen Abu Naser. "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."
The digging opens old wounds for a family nearly wiped off the map.
Aya Abu Naser, 29, lost her cousins, aunts, and uncles.
"Everyone I love... no one is left," she said. "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."
Gaza health officials say more than 73,000 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks during the war.
Israel denies accusations of genocide. It says its military campaign in Gaza was necessary to defeat Hamas, following the militant group's Oct. 7, 2023, attack that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel.
At the time of the strike on the Abu Naser family's building, the Israeli military was engaged in a weeks-long offensive in Beit Lahia and had ordered civilians to flee. It said it was targeting an "enemy spotter" on the roof of the Abu Naser family's building, without providing visual evidence.
Satellite imagery reveals that in the weeks following the attack on the Abu Naser family building, more Israeli bombing nearly erased the rest of the neighborhood.
New graves for bags of bones
At the end of the search, family members and rescue workers recite prayers, standing behind 50 white body bags laid out in the dirt.
Then they go to the cemetery.
Survivors dig new graves and gently lower into them bags of bones — bags that weigh almost nothing but mean everything to them.
And the big digging machine moves to the collapsed house next door.
That's where another family has been waiting their turn to recover their loved ones' skeletons, so the victims can finally rest in peace.
NPR's Daniel Estrin contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, Israel.
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