Facing hidden dangers

In an article in The Guardian, Haniya Albaiouny declared that she will be helping to “clear unexploded bombs in Gaza, my home. But I dread what I will find there” under 37 tonnes of rubble. “Yet this will be the most vital work I have ever done,” wrote Albaioumy who is a Gaza emergency response manager for the Mines Advisory Group.

Since she is from heavily bombed Gaza City, she is eager to restore “some kind of normality” to this tortured strip of land. A professional who has worked in explosives clearance for a decade, she left Gaza three months ago. Her family has been displaced to Khan Younis where they live in makeshift shelters along with hundreds of thousands of Gazans.

She pointed out that hidden horrors threaten “to blight hopes for recovery long after the bombs have stopped falling.” While it is one of “the most densely populated places on Earth” it could be “one of the most densely contaminated with unexploded ordinance.”

She will be guiding colleagues in heavy body armour as they sort and sift rubble for explosives with the aim of preventing death and destruction once Israel ends its war on Gaza and withdraws its forces. She said the UN Development Programme estimated that clearing Gaza of explosives could take over a decade and cost $40 billion.

Between Oct.7 and April 24, Israel dropped more than 70,000 tons (63,500 tonnes) of explosives on Gaza. These have been delivered by a wide variety of weaponry: conventional air-dropped bombs, rockets, artillery shells, tank rounds, grenades, and bullets. White phosphorus shells – which Israel has used in both Gaza and South Lebanon – are not meant to be deployed in urban areas but in battlefield conditions. On average, about 10 per cent of ordinance fails to explode on target, leaving long-term dangers for populations and humanitarian workers.

The UN Mines Action Service (UNMAS) has been operating in Gaza since 2009 following Israel’s first major assault which was mounted after Hamas took control of the strip in June 2007. This operation, which has served as a template for further Israeli onslaughts in 2014 and 2021, was far, far less devastating than the ongoing full-scale war.  The 2008-09 “Cast Lead” three-week offensive killed 1,166-1.417 Palestinians, destroyed 46,000 homes, and rendered 100,000 homeless. 

Tomoko Nakayama, programme officer with UNMAS Palestine, reported from Gaza on the UNMAS website after the war began that her office was in the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) compound in Gaza City which was largely destroyed by Israeli strikes. She said UNRWA schools and UN other international organisations’ offices were also destroyed or damaged. This meant, she wrote, “While the ongoing conflict required humanitarian assistance on an unprecedented scale, the activities of the United Nations, UNMAS and other organisations, were severely restricted at the start.”

Between October and December, while she managed operations from outside Gaza and secured donor funds, UNMAS staff in Gaza managed to improve safety for international workers in Gaza and providing security advice for 1.4 million of the 2.3 million Gazans. Gazan UNMAS staff who remain in the strip face the same problems as fellow countrymen and women. Many have lost homes and have taken refuge in southern Gaza where, she said, they are “working to protect other Gazan civilians from the risk of explosive ordnance while they themselves are in a very difficult situation.” 

To provide essential expertise not available in Gaza, international explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) experts have been deployed to ensure the safety of UN and other humanitarian workers. Among them is Carlos Mesa, who said that delivering aid “entails driving through rubble and destroyed areas, which are potentially contaminated by explosive remnants of war, for a long time, and involves high risks of explosive incidents. Therefore, no humanitarian activities can be delivered without UNMAS accompanying them, checking for unexploded ordnance and other threats, avoiding dangerous routes, and protecting humanitarian convoys.”

Of the millions of tonnes of rubble Israel has created in Gaza a considerable has been contaminated by explosives which must be cleared from every reconstruction site. Former UNMAS chief for Iraq Pehr Lodhammar, stated in April, “Based on the current [amount] of debris in Gaza, with 100 trucks we are talking about 14 years of work … to remove it.” He added that it is impossible to say how long this process will take until the war ends. The UN Environment Programme estimated that the mid-June figure for debris was 40 million tonnes.

At the end of June, the UN Satellite Centre reported that during the first eight months of the Gaza war more than 55 per cent of the strip’s structures have been destroyed. Homes, schools, hospitals, public buildings, commercial offices, cultural centres, religious sites, and infrastructure in main towns have been ravaged by Israeli bombardment. Housing suffered the most devastation, the Centre said. The term “urbicide,” the killing of cities, coined in the 1960s, has been applied by experts to Gaza and Ukraine. However, the latter has suffered far less devastation than Gaza. In a June 28 report France 24 television channel cited researcher Martin Coward, head of the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University in London. He said urbicide “is deliberate and not proportional to the strategic goals of war, and therefore violates the laws of war.” 

Coward began urbicide research in Sarajevo during the 1992-95 Bosnian war before probing other conflicts. He stated, “The destruction of cities was about preventing people from coming back. So even after a heavily shelled city was under the control of a particular [enemy] armed force, they would still go in and do things like dynamite houses. They would dynamite mosques and make them into a car park.”

Before tackling Gaza, he investigated Grozny in Chechnya, Aleppo in Syria, Mosul in Iraq, and Mariupol and Bucha in Ukraine.

I can say, however, there is no comparison between images of Gaza broadcast by satellite television and Aleppo. Aleppo was not destroyed during the civil/proxy conflict. The medieval souq at the centre of Aleppo was devastated (souqicide?) but “urbicide” does not apply to the formerly rebel/Daesh-held eastern sector of Aleppo. I can testify that eastern Aleppo was battered but largely standing and inhabited after the government ousted the rebels/Daesh at the end of December 2016. When I visited on March 8, 2017, I attended events celebrating International Women’s Day at a school in eastern Aleppo and an upmarket hotel in the largely unscarred western sector of the city.

I await the end of the Gaza war and permission to visit to see and report on who of my friends have survived (eight in one family have been killed) and what remains of its urban areas.

Photo: Reuters