The Electronic Intifada 7 March 2025
A bomb left by Israel in a Gaza home. (Rasha Abou Jalal)
After 15 months of displacement in the southern Gaza Strip, I thought I had lost the ability to be surprised. But I was wrong.
I returned to Gaza City on 6 February following the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel.
Almost everything in my home was reduced to rubble. And the memories scattered among the rubble seemed to scream at me.
I spotted a metal box with Hebrew writing on it and a key.
I picked the box up trying to determine if it was a can of tuna or beans.
I thought the box had been placed in the rubble as if someone wanted me to find it. I felt a lump in my throat.
Since when did a food box become so eye-catching?
My mind didn’t comprehend it at first, but something was strange. There was no clear expiration date or brand name.
When I lifted the box off the ground, it felt lighter than I thought it should have. This prompted me to recall the text messages that international organizations constantly send to my mobile phone, warning people not to tamper with any suspicious objects among the rubble of houses.
At that moment, I felt a shiver run down my spine. I put the box down, then took a step back, then another.
I immediately called the toll-free emergency number (102). I explained the situation to the person who answered, and I was told not to tamper with the box, to leave immediately and that a mine-clearing team was on its way.
It wasn’t long before two men in uniform but without any equipment in hand arrived. They introduced themselves as bomb disposal experts with Gaza’s interior ministry.
They asked me to point out where I had found the box. I did.
The two men then proceeded cautiously with one of them carefully picking up the box. He placed it inside an iron box in their vehicle.
A food trap
Next came the shock that made my legs wobbly. One of the men told me that the box was a trap, a bomb disguised as food.
“This is a gift of death that the Israeli soldiers left for the children of Gaza,” he said.
At that moment, I thanked God that I had not taken my five children home. I had left them with their grandmother at my parents’ house in the al-Nasr neighborhood, west of Gaza City.
The bomb disposal expert said demining crews had found dozens of mines that were intentionally placed and others that were unexploded ordnance due to a technical malfunction among the rubble of houses.
It is believed that there are still hundreds and perhaps thousands of these unexploded ordnances that have not yet been discovered.
Muhammad al-Qadi was killed on 7 February in the explosion of a suspicious object left by the Israeli army in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, according to the Wafa news agency.
In January, 10 people were injured – four critically – as a result of an explosion in al-Qarara, east of Khan Younis, also in southern Gaza.
United Nations data showed that more than 90 people have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance since the Israeli attacks began in October 2023, it was reported on 29 January.
The New York Times stated in December that the Israeli military fired nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza in the war’s first seven weeks, more than in the next eight months combined.
Sudden explosion
Muhammed al-Haddad, 31, did not know what his home in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City would be like after 15 months of war and displacement, but he sensed it would not be the same as he left it.
When al-Haddad arrived at his home on 2 February, he contemplated how his house was now just a pile of rubble, but that it was something that could be salvaged.
He found the remains of a closet, some wooden planks and an overturned table. As he was trying to pull out what he could carry, his foot stepped on a wooden plank half-buried in the rubble.
A sudden explosion lifted his body in the air for a few seconds before he fell hard to the ground and lost consciousness.
When he finally opened his eyes, the light was dim above him. He was lying in a bed, disoriented, not knowing where he was.
He remembered trying to get up and his body not responding.
He tried to move his right leg. It was not there.
He was in Gaza City’s Al Ahli Arab Hospital.
“For months I have been dreaming of this moment … to return to my home, even if nothing remains of it, but I never imagined that returning would lead to such a tragedy,” al-Haddad told The Electronic Intifada.
“Israel did not just destroy our homes, it left us to die in the rubble. They don’t even want us to mourn our homes in safety,” he added.
Al-Haddad is one of the untold number of Palestinian victims of Israel’s mines and ordnance.
“We are dealing with a situation where most of the people in Gaza will either return to a badly damaged building that they cannot move into or just a pile of rubble,” Achim Steiner, the UN Development Programme’s director, told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle in January.
“And that rubble still poses a danger. There are unexploded ordnance and landmines. It’s a very toxic environment.”
Muhammed Maqdad, head of the bomb disposal department at the Gaza interior ministry, told The Electronic Intifada that the Israeli army has dropped more than 85,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip since the start of the war.
“I believe that the volume of unexploded ordnance weighs about 9,000 tons,” he said, noting that his crews have found unexploded ordnance inside residential neighborhoods since the ceasefire.
Maqdad explained that experts conduct an initial examination of the ordnance before disposing of it by separating the detonator from it or transporting it to designated sites according to its danger.
Maqdad stressed the urgent need for specialized tools, such as heavy lifting equipment and modern protective equipment, to ensure the safe handling of these munitions.
It could take 14 years to make Gaza safe from unexploded ordnance, the United Nations Mine Action Service reported in April last year.
Rasha Abou Jalal is a journalist in Gaza.
