Gaza toll of 40,000 hides true scale of loss

Dalia Hawas was 24 when an Israeli airstrike flattened the apartment building where she lived in February, burying the young mother with her 10-month-old daughter, Mona.

- Malak A Tantesh, Emma Graham-Harrison

They are not listed among Gaza's war dead, because their bodies were trapped too deep beneath the rubble for rescue teams to reach them.

Ten months into Israel's war on Gaza, the death toll has passed 40,000, according to health authorities there. Most of the dead are civilians and the total represents nearly 2% of Gaza's prewar population, or one in every 50 residents.

But even that figure does not tell the full story of Palestinian losses. "This number, 40,000, includes only bodies that were received and buried," said Dr Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals at the Palestinian ministry of health.

"New procedures are being tested to include those who are missing or known to be under the rubble on the list of the dead, but they have not yet been approved." About 10,000 airstrike victims were thought to remain entombed in collapsed buildings, Hams said, because there was little heavy equipment or fuel to dig through steel and concrete ruins.

"Every time I remember Dalia, I start crying and shivering," said her mother, Fatima Hawas. "I picture her demolished house and feel I am suffocating, because even after her soul departed we could not recover her body for a proper burial."

A graduate in Arabic language and literature, Dalia loved to read and dreamed of becoming a teacher, she said. "Sometimes I still see her in my dreams and this makes it a little easier for me, even though I cry when I wake up." Another group of Palestinian war victims do not show up in the official count, which registers only those killed by bombs and bullets as war dead. Over the past 10 months the war has brought mass displacement into crowded shelters and makeshift tents, hunger as aid shipments have dwindled, and chronic shortages of clean water and sanitation, all of which spreads diseases.