KHAN YOUNIS: The Gaza Strip is strewn with undetonated explosives from tens of thousands of Israeli air strikes, leaving the territory “uninhabitable,” according to the US government.
In February, US President Donald Trump suggested the United States take over Gaza and take responsibility for clearing unexploded bombs and other weapons, to create the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The challenge to clear the lethal remnants, examined here in detail for the first time, is huge.
Israel’s bombardments resumed in March after a January ceasefire fell apart — an offensive that the United Nations said has captured or depopulated two-thirds of the enclave. More bombs fall daily.
By October 2024, Israel’s military said, it had carried out over 40,000 air strikes on the Strip. The UN Mine Action Service estimates that between one in 10 and one in 20 bombs fired into Gaza did not go off.
Those weapons are among more than 50 million tons of rubble which according to the UN Environment Programme are scattered across Gaza, a densely populated area far smaller than the State of Rhode Island.
"Inhumane"
Gaza’s own cleanup efforts started quickly. Near the city of Khan Younis a week after the January ceasefire, bulldozer driver Alaa Abu Jmeiza was clearing a street close to where 15-year old Saeed Abdel Ghafour was playing. The bulldozer blade struck a concealed bomb.
“We were engulfed in the heat of the flames, the fire,” the boy told Reuters. He said he had lost sight in one eye. Driver Jmeiza also lost sight in one eye and has burn and shrapnel injuries on his hands and legs.
Since the start of the war on October 7, 2023, at least 23 people have been killed and 162 injured by discarded or unexploded ordnance, according to a database compiled by a forum of UN agencies and NGOs working in Gaza — an estimate that aid workers say must be a fraction of the total, since few victims know how to report what has happened to them.
Hamas has said it harvested some unexploded ordnance for use against Israel, but also is ready to cooperate with international bodies to remove it.
However, international efforts to help clear the bombs during any lulls in the fighting have been hampered by Israel, which restricts imports into the enclave of goods that can have a military use, nine aid officials told Reuters.
Between March and July last year, Israeli authorities rejected requests to import more than 20 types of demining equipment, representing a total of over 2,000 items — from binoculars to armored vehicles to firing cables for detonations — according to a document compiled by two humanitarian demining organizations seen by Reuters.
“Due to the restrictions by the Israeli authorities on mine action organizations to allow the entry of necessary equipment, the clearance process has not started,” UN human rights office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence told Reuters.
This poses “serious unnecessary challenges” to humanitarians involved, he added.
Under the 1907 Hague Convention, Israel has an obligation as an occupying power to remove or help remove war remnants that endanger the lives of civilians, said the UN human rights office and the International Committee of the Red Cross. This is an obligation that Israel accepts as binding under customary international law even though it is not a signatory, said Cordula Droege, the ICRC’s chief legal officer.
Israel’s military declined to answer questions about what munitions it has used in Gaza for security reasons, and did not respond to a request for comment on the extent of leftover ordnance. COGAT, the Israeli military agency that oversees shipments into Gaza, did not respond to requests for comment on its role in cleanup efforts. Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel said most of the explosives have been scattered by Hamas, without providing evidence.
A Hamas official declined to answer a question about how many weapons it has used in Gaza or how much remains as unexploded ordnance.
“We have repeatedly stressed that Gaza is uninhabitable and to force Gazans to live among unexploded ordnance is inhumane,” said Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the US National Security Council.
“President Trump has offered a humanitarian vision to rebuild Gaza and we continue to have discussions with regional partners on next steps,” he added, without answering questions on weapons supplied by the US, or its plans for the clean-up.
10 years, $500 Million
Seven weapons experts participating in UN-coordinated discussions on clearance efforts told Reuters it is too early to estimate how many unexploded munitions are in Gaza as there has been no survey. Most asked to remain anonymous, saying that to speak publicly about the weapons contamination or clearance challenges may interfere with their chances of working in Gaza.
The UN Mine Action Service, which removes explosive remnants, educates locals and helps victims, said its disposal teams have spotted hundreds of pieces of war ordnance on the surface, including aircraft bombs, mortars, rockets and Improvised Explosive Devices.
It expects many more may be concealed either in the rubble or lodged underground as “deep-buried bombs.”
Reuters found a bomb more than a meter long on a trash heap in Gaza City, spoke to a man in Nuseirat who said he had to live in a refugee camp because the authorities could not remove a bomb he found in his home, and to others who were still living in a building in Khan Younis beneath which an unexploded bomb was said by police and local authorities to be buried in the sand.
A UN report said two bombs were found at Gaza’s Nuseirat power plant. Gary Toombs, an explosive ordnance disposal expert with Humanity & Inclusion, an aid group, said he had seen bomb remnants being used to prop up homeless shelters. Reuters could not verify these reports.
The Egyptian foreign ministry, which has also presented a reconstruction plan for Gaza, said in March that removing unexploded ordnance would be a priority during the first six months of that project. Removing debris would continue for another two years. A foreign ministry official did not respond to a request for additional details.
Even if Israel cooperated unreservedly, a forum of UN agencies and non-governmental organizations called “the protection cluster” estimated in a document published in December that it could take 10 years and $500 million to clear the bombs.
4,000 duds
Explosive or not, the ruins contain elements like asbestos and contaminants, the UN Environment Programme says — plus thousands of bodies of Palestinians, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
“The damage in Gaza is similar to an enormous earthquake and in the middle of it there’s a few thousand bombs to make it more difficult,” said Greg Crowther, Director of Programmes at the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a global humanitarian and advocacy organization that finds, removes and destroys unexploded bombs after conflict.
“You’ve got the incredibly long process of rebuilding and then these items mean it will take even longer.”
Taking Israel’s reported 40,000 air strikes as a basis, a 10 percent failure rate implies that even if each strike contained just one bomb there would be around 4,000 duds — not including naval or ground strikes or remnants left by Hamas and its allies.
Some experts like MAG’s Crowther think the bombs’ failure rate may be higher than one in 10 in urban centers, since bombs do not always detonate when piercing through multi-story buildings — especially ones that are already damaged.
“This is the most technically challenging and worst humanitarian situation I’ve ever seen,” said Toombs. He has demined in places including Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Lebanon over a 30-year career.
“It’s going to be incredibly difficult.”
Data on the Israeli strikes from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) shows there have been strikes on Gaza almost every day. In total, the ACLED database shows over 8,000 air strike events — a term that can include multiple individual strikes.
ACLED said that by the end of 2024, Israel had carried out more than nine times as many air strikes as a US-led coalition had in the Battle of Mosul in Iraq in 2016-2017.
Mark 80 Bombs
Palestinian police say they lack equipment to safely clear the debris.
Salama Marouf, the head of the Hamas-run government media office, said 31 members of the police engineering division who deal with weapons clearance had been killed and 22 injured since the war, including while defusing bombs.
Basem Shurrab, the mayor of Al-Qarara town where the January 27 bulldozer explosion occurred, called for international teams to come and help the cleanup.
But those groups say they would need Israel to give the go-ahead for expert visas, armored vehicles, explosives and tunnelling equipment to extract buried bombs.
For now, deminers say they can only mark ordnance and seek to avoid accidents, especially involving children.
Murals and posters commissioned by charities including the Red Cross and Red Crescent show colorful balloons to attract children’s attention next to drawings of bombs and a skull and cross bones.
One shows a boy with an alarmed expression with a thought bubble reading: “DANGER: war ordnance.”
The heaviest class of bombs used in Gaza are the Mark 80s, of which the Mark 84 — a US-made, 2,000 pound aircraft bomb nicknamed the “hammer” by US pilots during the first Gulf War — is the biggest.
The Biden administration sent thousands of Mark 84s to Israel before pausing deliveries last year over concerns about the risk to civilians — a pause since reversed by Trump.
Reuters reporters found two Mark 80s lying in the ruins of Khan Younis, surrounded by red and white warning tape. Three weapons experts identified them from Reuters images. They said they appeared to be Mark 84s, but they could not be sure without measuring them.
If a Mark 84 bomb were to detonate it would leave a crater 14 meters wide, destroy everything within a 7 m radius and kill most people within a 31 m radius, according to PAX, an NGO working for peace based in the Netherlands.
The blast can shower lethal shrapnel fragments nearly 400 m, according to the US airforce. In a landscape as densely populated as Gaza, that could be catastrophic.
Living with a bomb
Hani Al Abadlah, a 49-year-old school teacher, returned to his home in Khan Younis after the January ceasefire to discover that an unidentified bomb had pierced through all three floors without detonating.
It is now believed to be nestled a few meters in the sand beneath his hallway, according to municipal officials and the police explosives engineering unit.
Three weapons disposal experts said a very heavy bomb such as a Mark 84 could have plunged into the deep sand, but added that it could have been removed before Al Abadlah returned — possibly to be reharvested by armed groups.
Al Abadlah said the rest of his family including his wife and children refused to move back because they were too afraid. But he prefers to live in his own damaged home with his brother and the suspected bomb rather than return to a cold tent.
He sleeps on the middle floor and his brother on the floor above.
“No one ... enters out of fear,” he said. “We now are trying to stay in the upper floors, far from where this war remnant is.”
The unexploded bombs of Gaza
https://arab.news/m42hc
The unexploded bombs of Gaza
- Since the start of the war on October 7, 2023, at least 23 people have been killed and 162 injured by discarded or unexploded ordnance
- International efforts to help clear the bombs during any lulls in the fighting have been hampered by Israel
Israeli strikes kill 23 in Gaza, including a journalist and rescue service official
- Israeli fire kills at least 23 people in Gaza
- Israel controls 77 percent of Gaza Strip, Hamas media office says
CAIRO: Israeli military strikes killed at least 23 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Sunday, including a local journalist and a senior rescue service official, local health authorities said.
The latest deaths in the Israeli campaign resulted from separate Israeli strikes in Khan Younis in the south, Jabalia in the north and Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip, medics said.
In Jabalia, they said local journalist Hassan Majdi Abu Warda and several family members were killed by an airstrike that hit his house earlier on Sunday.
Another airstrike in Nuseirat killed Ashraf Abu Nar, a senior official in the territory’s civil emergency service, and his wife in their house, medics added.
There was no immediate comment by the Israeli military.
The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said that Abu Warda’s death raised the number of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 220.
In a separate statement, the media office said Israeli forces were in control of 77 percent of the Gaza Strip, either through ground forces or evacuation orders and bombardment that keeps residents away from their homes.
The armed wing of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said in separate statements on Sunday that fighters carried out several ambushes and attacks using bombs and anti-tank rockets against Israeli forces operating in several areas across Gaza.
On Friday the Israeli military said it had conducted more strikes in Gaza overnight, hitting 75 targets including weapons storage facilities and rocket launchers.
Israel launched an air and ground war in Gaza after Hamas militants’ cross-border attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people by Israeli tallies with 251 hostages abducted into Gaza.
The conflict has killed more than 53,900 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, and devastated the coastal strip. Aid groups say signs of severe malnutrition are widespread.
Israeli military says it intercepted missile from Yemen
- Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have continued to fire missiles at Israel in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza
CAIRO: The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen toward Israel.
Sirens sounded in several areas in the country, the Israeli military said earlier.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have continued to fire missiles at Israel in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Most of the group’s missile have been intercepted or have fallen short.
The Houthis did not immediately comment on the latest missile launch.
Syria to help locate missing Americans
DAMASCUS: Syria’s new authorities have agreed to help the United States locate and return Americans who went missing in the war-torn country, a US envoy said on Sunday.
“The new Syrian government has agreed to assist the USA in locating and returning USA citizens or their remains. The families of Austin Tice, Majd Kamalmaz, and Kayla Mueller must have closure,” US special envoy for Syria Tom Barrack wrote on X.
Turkiye, PKK must both change for peace: former militant
- For years, Yuksel Genc was a fighter with the Kurdish rebel group
- Genc herself joined the militants in 1995 when she was a 20-year-old university student in Istanbul
DIYARBAKIR, Turkiye: “When you try and explain peace to people, there is a very serious lack of trust,” said Yuksel Genc, a former fighter with the PKK, which recently ended its decades-long armed struggle against the Turkish state.
Talking over a glass of tea in a square in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in Turkiye’s Kurdish-dominated southeast, this 50-year-old former fighter with long auburn curls is worried about how the nascent rapprochement between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) will play out.
“The guerillas are sincere, but they don’t think the state is,” said Genc, her words briefly interrupted by the roar of a fighter jet flying overhead.
“They think the government does not trust them.”
For years, she was a fighter with the Kurdish rebel group, which on May 12 said it would disarm and disband, ending a four-decade armed struggle against the Turkish state that cost more than 40,000 lives.
The historic move came in response to an appeal by its jailed founder Abdullah Ocalan, arrested in 1999 and serving life in solitary ever since on a prison island near Istanbul.
Genc herself joined the militants in 1995 when she was a 20-year-old university student in Istanbul.
“At that time, many Kurdish villages were being burnt down, and we were constantly hearing about villages being evacuated, people being displaced and unsolved murders,” she said.
She described it as “a time of terrible repression.”
“You felt trapped, as if there was no other way than to join the guerrillas,” she said.
Four years later, after years in exile, Ocalan was snatched by Turkish commandos in a Hollywood-style operation in Nairobi.
“Ocalan’s capture provoked a deep sense of rage among the guerrillas, who feared it would mean the Kurdish cause would be destroyed,” she said.
But it was Ocalan himself who called for calm and insisted it was time for the Kurdish question to be resolved democratically. He urged his followers to go to Turkiye, hand over their weapons and seek dialogue.
“He thought our arrival would symbolize (the PKK’s) goodwill, and persuade the state to negotiate.”
Genc was part of the first so-called “groups for peace and a democratic solution” — a group of three women and five men who arrived in Turkiye on October 1, 1999 on what they knew would be a “sacrificial” mission.
After a long march through the mountains, they arrived in the southeastern village of Semdinli under the watchful eye of “thousands” of Turkish soldiers huddled behind rocks.
Handing over their weapons, they were transferred to the city of Van 200 kilometers (140 miles) to the north where they were arrested.
Genc spent the next nearly six years behind bars.
“For us, these peace groups were a mission,” she said. “The solution had to come through dialogue.”
After getting out, she continued to struggle for Kurdish rights, swapping her gun for a pen to become a journalist and researcher for the Sosyo Politik think tank.
Even so, her writing earned her another three-and-a-half years behind bars.
“Working for peace in Turkiye has a cost,” she said with a shrug.
When Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister in 2003, there was hope for a new breakthrough. But several attempts to reach an agreement went nowhere — until now.
“Like in 1999, the PKK is moving toward a non-violent struggle,” she said.
“But laying down arms is not the end of the story. It is preparing to become a political organization.”
Resolving the decades-long conflict requires a change on both sides however, said Genc.
“It essentially involves a mutual transformation,” she argued.
“It is impossible for the state to stick with its old ways without transforming, while trying to resolve a problem as old and divisive as the Kurdish question.”
Despite the recent opening, Genc does not speak of hope.
“Life has taught us to be realistic: years of experience have generated an ocean of insecurity,” she said.
“(PKK fighters) have shown their courage by saying they will lay down their weapons without being defeated. But they haven’t seen any concrete results.”
So far, the government, which initiated the process last autumn, has not taken any steps nor made any promises, she pointed out.
“Why haven’t the sick prisoners been released? And those who have served their sentences — why aren’t they benefiting from the climate of peace?“
And Ocalan, she said, was still being held in solitary despite promises of a change in his situation.
The number of people jailed for being PKK members or close to the group has never been revealed by the Turkish authorities.
“The fact that Ocalan is still not in a position to be able to lead this process toward a democratic solution is a major drawback from the militants’ point of view,” she said.
“Even our daily life remains totally shaped by security constraints across the region with the presence of the army, the roadblocks — all that has to change.”
First class graduates from American University of Baghdad, once Saddam’s palace
- A total of 38 students — 20 male and 18 female — graduated Saturday with degrees in business administration, sciences and humanities at a ceremony attended by political dignitaries as well as families and faculty members
BAGHDAD: The American University of Baghdad celebrated the graduation of its first cohort of students Saturday at a campus that was once a palace built by Saddam Hussein.
Officials said they hope the graduation will mark the beginning of a new era in higher education in Iraq rooted in modernity, openness and international academic standards.
The university was inaugurated in 2021 on the site of the Al-Faw Palace, built on an island in the middle of an artificial lake by Saddam in the 1990s to mark the retaking of the peninsula of the same name during the war.
After the US-led invasion that unseated Saddam in 2003, it was used as a US coalition military headquarters called Camp Victory. It was later developed into an American-style university with a core liberal arts program through funding by influential Iraqi business owner Saadi Saihood.
A total of 38 students — 20 male and 18 female — graduated Saturday with degrees in business administration, sciences and humanities at a ceremony attended by political dignitaries as well as families and faculty members.
Speaking to the attendees, university President Dr. Michael Mulnix reflected on the university’s rocky beginnings.
“When I first arrived at the American University of Baghdad in 2018, the campus looked nothing like it does today,” he said. “Years of war and neglect had left the infrastructure in ruins, with many buildings damaged or destroyed. Today, we stand before an exceptional, nonprofit academic institution that ranks among the finest research universities.”
Today AUB has a growing network of international partnerships with top universities, he said, including Vanderbilt University, Colorado School of Mines, Lawrence Technological University, Temple University, the University of Exeter, and Sapienza University of Rome.
University founder and owner Saihood called the graduation “a symbolic moment that affirms this institution was built to last and to make a real difference.”
He acknowledged the economic challenges facing graduates, especially the scarcity of government employment, but emphasized that the university has equipped its students with the adaptability and initiative needed to thrive in the private sector or through entrepreneurship.
Although Iraq’s security situation has improved in recent years after decades of conflict, the country still suffers from brain drain as young people seek opportunities and stability abroad.
“The future in Iraq is not easy. All of us graduates have concerns,” said Mohammed Baqir from Najaf province, who graduated Saturday with a bachelor’s degree in business. “But what sets us apart from other universities is that we’ve already received job offers through AUB, especially in the private sector. Although my education cost around ten million Iraqi dinars, it was a truly valuable investment.” Ten million Iraqi dinars equals about $7,600.
