In Gaza City’s Sabra neighborhood, where layers of rubble bury both homes and memories, Mahmoud Abu Ismail, 37, stands alone before what was once his family’s residential building. On December 6, 2023, a single Israeli airstrike altered the course of his life forever. The building was completely destroyed. Mahmoud lost his wife—who was nine months pregnant—his six children, and his brother, along with his brother’s wife and four children. Mahmoud was the sole survivor, left with severe injuries and a story that did not end with survival.
“I lost my wife and all my children. I am the only survivor—praise be to God,” Mahmoud says quietly, his voice heavy with exhaustion. He was inside the same building at the moment of the strike and sustained critical injuries. To this day, he continues treatment and hopes to one day leave Gaza through the Rafah crossing for medical care, “like tens of thousands of patients in Gaza,” he adds.
Returning to the ruins
A year after his injury, Mahmoud returned—not to a home, but to a mass of ruins. He tried to recover the bodies of his wife and children from beneath the debris. He appealed to institutions, charities, and anyone connected to recovery efforts, asking for heavy machinery to help retrieve them. No one responded.
Armed with only primitive tools—a hammer and a sieve—Mahmoud began digging himself. The building had six floors and weighed an estimated 400 tons of concrete. He removed one collapsed ceiling after another until he reached the level where his brother’s family had lived. “Here, my brother, his wife, and their four children were killed,” he says. After three months of searching, the fighting intensified and nearby bombardment forced him to stop.
Digging through the rubble
At the end of 2025, Mahmoud returned again. His body was frail, but his determination was unbroken. He dug nearly eight meters deep into the rubble of the residential building, destroyed by a missile weighing approximately 2,000 pounds. After days of digging on the western side—where his children’s room once was—he reached a blackened layer.
“That meant the apartment was burned. My children melted and vaporized. There was no point in continuing the search,” he says, surrendering to a truth almost impossible to accept.
He moved to the eastern side, where the bedroom had been. “My wife was nine months pregnant,” he says. During the search, he found remnants of bones, burned and crumbled, their color indistinguishable from the soil, discovered through the sieve.
Mahmoud is careful to explain:
“I did not use the sieve to make people grieve or to gain sympathy. I used it because I had nothing else.”
The sieve—an improvised tool of desperation—became his only means of searching for remains, and a stark symbol of abandonment. “Today, I use a sieve to look for my family’s remains,” Mahmoud says bitterly. “But on the Day of Judgment, the leaders of the Arab and Islamic world—who could have helped me and chose not to—will be held accountable.”
He points to what he describes as a painful double standard. “When Israeli captives’ bodies were searched for, the Egyptian crossing was opened and heavy equipment was brought in to look for a single Israeli soldier. But my children—and nearly ten thousand bodies still buried under the rubble across Gaza—have not been acknowledged by anyone. This is justice measured by two different scales.”
Casualties of the war
The death toll from the Israeli occupation’s aggression against the Gaza Strip has reached 72,136 martyrs and 171,839 wounded since the start of the offensive on October 7, 2023.
Since the ceasefire last October, the number of martyrs has risen to 651, and the total number of injuries to 1,741.