In Gaza, One Man Is Searching for the Remains of His Family With a Flour Sifter

“If I was able to reach my wife and children in this primitive way, there are many others in Gaza who are searching for the same thing. Just provide the means.”

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Abu Ismail Hammad searches for the remains of his family using a flour sifter in the rubble of their home in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City on January 18, 2026. (Screenshot of footage provided by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

GAZA CITY—For 200 days, Abu Ismail Hammad has been digging beneath his home in Gaza City, painstakingly collecting the remains of his wife and unborn child. He has been using a flour sifter to find their bone fragments hidden in the sand.

His entire family was killed just under two months into Israel’s genocidal assault, when an airstrike hit their home in the Sabra neighborhood on December 6, 2023. His five children—Ismail, Mohammed, Ghaith, Jana, and Joudi—aged between eight to 16 years old, were all killed, along with his wife, Naama Alaa Al-Din Hammad. Naama was nine months pregnant with their sixth child, a girl they were planning to name Haifa, after her martyred aunt. His brother, sister-in-law and all of their children were also killed.

Hammad had left the apartment to go upstairs to another floor just 15 minutes before the strike. He was badly injured in the attack. Hammad was the sole survivor.

Wounded and displaced, and with the war raging, it took him a year before he was able to return, at the end of 2024, to begin trying to recover their bodies. After a few weeks, he was forced to stop again as Israel’s assault in the area intensified again. In November, soon after the so-called ceasefire went into effect, Hammad returned once more to find them.

He showed Drop Site pictures of them all together, smiling before the war, their faces slightly distorted by his heavily cracked phone screen.

Abu Ismail Hammad searches for the remains of his family beneath the rubble of their home in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City on January 18, 2026. (Footage provided by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

Hammad spent weeks clearing away tons of rubble and then began to dig. “I was able to recover my brother, his wife, and their children. When I reached the living room in my home, it became clear that it was completely burned. I realized that the fate of my children was unknown—that they were burned and their bones had melted away. I then went to the room where my wife had been and I found her bones,” Hammad told Drop Site News. “How did I know it was my wife? First, the location of the room. Second, the bones of the unborn child were found in the same place, because the pregnancy was complete.”

He spoke crouching in a large hole, several feet deep, surrounded by the remnants of his destroyed home. Neighbors helped in the effort, digging with shovels, hoes, and their bare hands through the earth before placing small mounds in a sifter for him to sort through.

“I am now collecting her piece by piece. With what? With this sifter. This sifter is normally used to sift flour… Today, I am using it to collect the bones of my wife and children,” he continued. “Collecting bones with a shovel is difficult, so I thought of using a sifter—to sift, bone by bone, one by one. And praise be to God, I was able to reach this,” he said, pointing to a small pile of bone fragments, brown with dirt, grouped together on a tarp.

In Gaza, the living are surrounded by the dead. Over 72,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed but over 10,000 are estimated to be buried under tens of millions of tons of rubble. Israel has heavily restricted the entry of bulldozers, excavation equipment, and fuel into the enclave, preventing any search on a meaningful scale to get underway. Just 717 bodies have been recovered over the past four months.

Equipment was allowed into Gaza to retrieve the remains of Israeli captives—the last of which, a policeman, was located on January 26 and returned to Israel. Israeli troops excavated and destroyed the Palestinian Al-Batsh cemetery in northern Gaza as they searched for his remains.

“For a Zionist soldier, a killer—the one who killed us and killed our children, along with his occupying, colonial state that has colonized us since 1948—the entire world mobilized and did not rest until his body was recovered from Gaza,” Hammad said. “If I was able to reach my wife and children in this primitive way, there are many others in Gaza who are searching for the same thing,” he said. “Just provide the means.”

Palestinians’ search for bodies has become a defining feature of the genocide in Gaza. The efforts are constant and often futile. Along with the thousands lying beneath Gaza’s devastated landscape, an unknown number of Palestinian bodies are being held by Israel. As part of the ceasefire deal, Israel agreed to hand over the bodies of 15 Palestinians to Gaza in exchange for every Israeli body that was returned.

The last official exchange came on January 29, when Israel returned 15 Palestinian bodies after the remains of the last Israeli captive in Gaza was found. That brought the number of Palestinian bodies handed over by Israel since November to 360, all of them without identification and many bearing signs of abuse, torture, and summary execution.

Without forensic equipment or DNA testing kits, authorities in Gaza have been forced to photograph the remains and post them online or hold screenings for Palestinian families in the hope they can identify a piece of clothing or an identifying mark of their loved ones. Only 60 have been identified, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Dozens have been buried as unknown martyrs in mass graves.

“The population continues to face severe challenges. It continues to face immense suffering, destruction, and death. Thousands of families are awaiting any news about their missing children, and their pain continues amid the extreme difficulties they face in identifying their loved ones, given the limited forensic capacities in the Gaza Strip,” Amani Al-Naouq, spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told Drop Site outside Al-Shifa hospital on January 29 as the bodies were being carried in.

A week later, on February 4, Israel unexpectedly handed over the bodies of 54 Palestinians along with 66 boxes of body parts through the Red Cross. The boxes contained only skulls and bones, while some of the returned bodies showed signs of severe mutilation, including severed hands and abdomens surgically opened and subsequently re-stitched, according to Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of Al-Shifa, in an interview on Al-Araby TV.

“We do not know where these bodies were recovered from—whether from Al-Batsh cemetery for example, or whether they were bodies that had been buried in other cemeteries inside the Gaza Strip, or bodies that were in the occupied Palestinian areas,” Moein Al-Wahidi, head of the special committee for receiving bodies, told Drop Site as he stood outside Al-Shifa hospital. “We are facing a real dilemma: the lack of tools and the absence of identification systems, such as DNA testing. This makes the documentation process difficult, primitive, and traditional, relying on photography and on families of the martyrs and missing persons recognizing certain details of their loved ones, such as clothing or shoes.”

The bodies of 54 Palestinians along with 66 boxes of body parts arrive from Israel at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on February 4, 2026. (Footage provided by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

Allam Abu Wadi came to Al-Shifa on February 4 after hearing that more bodies were returned in the hopes of identifying his 17-year-old brother, Mohammed, who went missing nearly two years ago, on February 26, 2024, near a checkpoint in southern Gaza.

“I lost my brother two years ago. There is no information at all. Some people say he’s there, others say he’s not. And today we came just to identify his body,” Abu Wadi told Drop Site. “There is no way—no simple, clear evidence—that allows you to say whether he is here or not. We can’t find any way. Anything—clothes, for example, teeth, anything. Everything has decomposed.”

He continued, “Over the past two years, we went to Nasser Hospital, we went to Al-Aqsa, and today we came here to Al-Shifa. We are trying as much as we can just to identify the bodies of our children. But there is no evidence—any evidence, anything—to prove that these are our children. These are decomposed remains, decomposed organs. There is nothing.”

Each body or box was brought inside a room where a team of doctors and specialists gathered to photograph and examine each of the remains.

“The bodies arrive to us without any information, without any details, without even identification tags. They arrive labeled with only a number—the body is a number. But we are not numbers. These are Palestinian bodies, Palestinian martyrs. They are not numbers,” Al-Wahidi said. “Our message to the entire world is this: preserve the dignity of the Palestinian body, preserve the dignity of the Palestinian martyr. All international capabilities must be mobilized, as stipulated in international laws and conventions, to preserve human dignity and the dignity of the dead. The Palestinian is no less worthy than any other person in the world.”

Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report. Sami Vanderlip edited the video.