The unexploded bombs of Gaza

By Emma Farge, Nidal al-Mughrabi, Hatem Khaled and Ramadan Abed

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza (Reuters) - The Gaza Strip is strewn with undetonated explosives from tens of thousands of Israeli air strikes, leaving the territory "uninhabitable", according to the U.S. government.

In February, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested the United States take over Gaza and take responsibility for clearing unexploded bombs and other weapons, to create the "Riviera of the Middle East".

The challenge to clear the lethal remnants, examined here in detail for the first time, is huge.

Israel's bombardments resumed in March after a January ceasefire fell apart -- an offensive that the United Nations said has captured or depopulated two-thirds of the enclave. More bombs fall daily.

By October 2024, Israel's military said, it had carried out over 40,000 air strikes on the Strip. The U.N. Mine Action Service estimates that between one in 10 and one in 20 bombs fired into Gaza did not go off.

Those weapons are among more than 50 million tons of rubble which according to the U.N. Environment Programme are scattered across Gaza, a densely populated area far smaller than the State of Rhode Island.

"INHUMANE"

Gaza's own cleanup efforts started quickly. Near the city of Khan Younis a week after the January ceasefire, bulldozer driver Alaa Abu Jmeiza was clearing a street close to where 15-year old Saeed Abdel Ghafour was playing. The bulldozer blade struck a concealed bomb.

"We were engulfed in the heat of the flames, the fire," the boy told Reuters. He said he had lost sight in one eye. Driver Jmeiza also lost sight in one eye and has burn and shrapnel injuries on his hands and legs.

Since the start of the war on October 7, 2023, at least 23 people have been killed and 162 injured by discarded or unexploded ordnance, according to a database compiled by a forum of U.N. agencies and NGOs working in Gaza — an estimate that aid workers say must be a fraction of the total, since few victims know how to report what has happened to them.

Hamas has said it harvested some unexploded ordnance for use against Israel, but also is ready to cooperate with international bodies to remove it.

However, international efforts to help clear the bombs during any lulls in the fighting have been hampered by Israel, which restricts imports into the enclave of goods that can have a military use, nine aid officials told Reuters.

Between March and July last year, Israeli authorities rejected requests to import more than 20 types of demining equipment, representing a total of over 2,000 items — from binoculars to armoured vehicles to firing cables for detonations — according to a document compiled by two humanitarian demining organisations seen by Reuters.

"Due to the restrictions by the Israeli authorities on mine action organizations to allow the entry of necessary equipment, the clearance process has not started," U.N. human rights office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence told Reuters.

This poses "serious unnecessary challenges" to humanitarians involved, he added.

Under the 1907 Hague Convention, Israel has an obligation as an occupying power to remove or help remove war remnants that endanger the lives of civilians, said the U.N. human rights office and the International Committee of the Red Cross. This is an obligation that Israel accepts as binding under customary international law even though it is not a signatory, said Cordula Droege, the ICRC's chief legal officer.

Israel's military declined to answer questions about what munitions it has used in Gaza for security reasons, and did not respond to a request for comment on the extent of leftover ordnance. COGAT, the Israeli military agency that oversees shipments into Gaza, did not respond to requests for comment on its role in cleanup efforts. Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel said most of the explosives have been scattered by Hamas, without providing evidence.

A Hamas official declined to answer a question about how many weapons it has used in Gaza or how much remains as unexploded ordnance.

"We have repeatedly stressed that Gaza is uninhabitable and to force Gazans to live amongst unexploded ordnance is inhumane," said Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council.

"President Trump has offered a humanitarian vision to rebuild Gaza and we continue to have discussions with regional partners on next steps," he added, without answering questions on weapons supplied by the U.S., or its plans for the clean-up.

10 YEARS, $500 MILLION

Seven weapons experts participating in U.N.-coordinated discussions on clearance efforts told Reuters it is too early to estimate how many unexploded munitions are in Gaza as there has been no survey. Most asked to remain anonymous, saying that to speak publicly about the weapons contamination or clearance challenges may interfere with their chances of working in Gaza.

The U.N. Mine Action Service, which removes explosive remnants, educates locals and helps victims, said its disposal teams have spotted hundreds of pieces of war ordnance on the surface, including aircraft bombs, mortars, rockets and Improvised Explosive Devices.

It expects many more may be concealed either in the rubble or lodged underground as "deep-buried bombs".

Reuters found a bomb more than a meter long on a trash heap in Gaza City, spoke to a man in Nuseirat who said he had to live in a refugee camp because the authorities could not remove a bomb he found in his home, and to others who were still living in a building in Khan Younis beneath which an unexploded bomb was said by police and local authorities to be buried in the sand.

A U.N. report said two bombs were found at Gaza's Nuseirat power plant. Gary Toombs, an explosive ordnance disposal expert with Humanity & Inclusion, an aid group, said he had seen bomb remnants being used to prop up homeless shelters. Reuters could not verify these reports.

The Egyptian foreign ministry, which has also presented a reconstruction plan for Gaza, said in March that removing unexploded ordnance would be a priority during the first six months of that project. Removing debris would continue for another two years. A foreign ministry official did not respond to a request for additional details.

Even if Israel cooperated unreservedly, a forum of U.N. agencies and non-governmental organisations called "the protection cluster" estimated in a document published in December that it could take 10 years and $500 million to clear the bombs.

4,000 DUDS

Explosive or not, the ruins contain elements like asbestos and contaminants, the U.N. Environment Programme says — plus thousands of bodies of Palestinians, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

"The damage in Gaza is similar to an enormous earthquake and in the middle of it there's a few thousand bombs to make it more difficult," said Greg Crowther, Director of Programmes at the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a global humanitarian and advocacy organisation that finds, removes and destroys unexploded bombs after conflict.

"You've got the incredibly long process of rebuilding and then these items mean it will take even longer."

Taking Israel's reported 40,000 air strikes as a basis, a 10% failure rate implies that even if each strike contained just one bomb there would be around 4,000 duds — not including naval or ground strikes or remnants left by Hamas and its allies.

Some experts like MAG's Crowther think the bombs' failure rate may be higher than one in 10 in urban centres, since bombs do not always detonate when piercing through multi-story buildings — especially ones that are already damaged.

"This is the most technically challenging and worst humanitarian situation I've ever seen," said Toombs. He has demined in places including Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Lebanon over a 30-year career.

"It's going to be incredibly difficult."

Data on the Israeli strikes from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) shows there have been strikes on Gaza almost every day. In total, the ACLED database shows over 8,000 air strike events -- a term that can include multiple individual strikes.

ACLED said that by the end of 2024, Israel had carried out more than nine times as many air strikes as a U.S.-led coalition had in the Battle of Mosul in Iraq in 2016-2017.

MARK 80 BOMBS

Palestinian police say they lack equipment to safely clear the debris.

Salama Marouf, the head of the Hamas-run government media office, said 31 members of the police engineering division who deal with weapons clearance had been killed and 22 injured since the war, including while defusing bombs.

Basem Shurrab, the mayor of Al-Qarara town where the January 27 bulldozer explosion occurred, called for international teams to come and help the cleanup.

But those groups say they would need Israel to give the go-ahead for expert visas, armoured vehicles, explosives and tunnelling equipment to extract buried bombs.

For now, deminers say they can only mark ordnance and seek to avoid accidents, especially involving children.

Murals and posters commissioned by charities including the Red Cross and Red Crescent show colorful balloons to attract children's attention next to drawings of bombs and a skull and cross bones.

One shows a boy with an alarmed expression with a thought bubble reading: "DANGER: war ordnance".

The heaviest class of bombs used in Gaza are the Mark 80s, of which the Mark 84 -- a U.S.-made, 2,000 pound aircraft bomb nicknamed the "hammer" by U.S. pilots during the first Gulf War — is the biggest.

The Biden administration sent thousands of Mark 84s to Israel before pausing deliveries last year over concerns about the risk to civilians -- a pause since reversed by Trump.

Reuters reporters found two Mark 80s lying in the ruins of Khan Younis, surrounded by red and white warning tape. Three weapons experts identified them from Reuters images. They said they appeared to be Mark 84s, but they could not be sure without measuring them.

If a Mark 84 bomb were to detonate it would leave a crater 14 meters wide, destroy everything within a 7 m radius and kill most people within a 31 m radius, according to PAX, an NGO working for peace based in the Netherlands.

The blast can shower lethal shrapnel fragments nearly 400 m, according to the U.S. airforce. In a landscape as densely populated as Gaza, that could be catastrophic.

LIVING WITH A BOMB

Hani Al Abadlah, a 49-year-old school teacher, returned to his home in Khan Younis after the January ceasefire to discover that an unidentified bomb had pierced through all three floors without detonating.

It is now believed to be nestled a few meters in the sand beneath his hallway, according to municipal officials and the police explosives engineering unit.

Three weapons disposal experts said a very heavy bomb such as a Mark 84 could have plunged into the deep sand, but added that it could have been removed before Al Abadlah returned — possibly to be reharvested by armed groups.

Al Abadlah said the rest of his family including his wife and children refused to move back because they were too afraid. But he prefers to live in his own damaged home with his brother and the suspected bomb rather than return to a cold tent.

He sleeps on the middle floor and his brother on the floor above.

"No one ... enters out of fear," he said. "We now are trying to stay in the upper floors, far from where this war remnant is."

(Reporting by Emma Farge in Geneva; Hatem Khaled and Ramadan Abed in Khan Younis, Gaza and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo; Additional reporting by Phil Stewart in Washington; Alexander Cornwell and James Mackenzie in Jerusalem; Nafisa Eltahir and Mohamed Ezz in Cairo; Adolfo Arranz and Han Huang in Hong Kong; Simon Scarr and Gerry Doyle in Singapore; Edited by Sara Ledwith)