Gaza's true death toll concealed beneath the rubble

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

- Malak A Tantesh GAZA and 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.

The total represents nearly 2% of Gaza's prewar population. 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 aid the search for them.

"Every time I remember Dalia, I start crying and shivering," said her mother, Fatima Hawas. “ Even after her soul departed we could not recover her body for a proper burial.”

Another group of victims do not show up in the offi cial count, which only registers 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 dwindled and chronic shortages of clean water and sanitation which spread diseases.

Hospitals have been bombed and besieged, their supplies of medicines, equipment and fuel cut off, their medical staff detained or killed, and their wards left overflowing.