Story by Mohammed Ahmed

GAZA CITY—Mahmoud Khilla waited for nearly two and half years for the remains of his family to be retrieved from under the rubble of their home before he decided to take matters into his own hands. The Israeli military bombed the five story building in Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, on December 21, 2023, demolishing it with two missiles and killing all 39 people inside. Mahmoud had gone out just 10 minutes earlier to get some food for dinner. He returned to find a massacre.

“There was no warning strike, no call, no prior warning,” Khilla told Drop Site News. “There were 24 children in the house under the age of 17. They killed them all.” Eighteen of the bodies were pulled out in the immediate aftermath, but 21 remained buried, including his wife, children, father, brother, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews, and other relatives.

“For nearly 30 months, we repeatedly called on Civil Defense, the municipality, and local institutions to come and clear the rubble so we could retrieve the bodies. There was no response,” Khilla, 40, told Drop Site. “We appealed to everyone but there is no equipment, no tools. They couldn’t clear the rubble.”

Khilla spoke sitting in a chair on top of the wreckage of where his family home once stood—a small mountain of broken concrete with tentacles of twisted rebar protruding outward at awkward angles.

“I had a son who was just 40 days old. My brother Ahmed had a daughter who was 8 months old. His eldest daughter was 7 years old. My brother Mohammed’s son was in second grade, and the older one was in tenth grade,” he said. “There is no peace of mind. You always think—in winter you think, in summer you think—what has happened to them? You keep thinking about it 24 hours a day, it becomes an obsession. One eventually reaches his limit.”

Read More: With No Equipment Allowed Into Gaza, Palestinians Are Digging With Their Hands to Retrieve the Dead