Thousands of Unexploded Bombs Dropped by Israel Have Turned Gaza into a Minefield
Five children were recently wounded by unexploded ordnance as they were searching for firewood in the rubble of Gaza City.
“As soon as one of the kids pulled a piece of wood, something exploded. The children were thrown into the air—all of them,”
GAZA CITY ( WEB NEWS )
Mohammed Nour returned with his family from Khan Younis to Gaza City on October 13th, three days after the ceasefire went into effect, along with thousands of other Palestinians. “As soon as they announced the truce, we came back immediately,” Nour told Drop Site. “From the moment Gaza City opened, we were among the first to return, because of everything we had suffered in the south.”
The family set up a tent just behind Al-Shifa hospital in an area that—like much of the city— was filled with large mounds of rubble and debris following Israel’s concentrated aerial bombardment and shelling. “It was around 10 or 11 a.m. I told the kids, ‘Go bring some cardboard, some wood, and a bit of plastic so we can light a fire.’ We wanted to cook something for the kids to eat,” Nour said. “We had just arrived and had nothing to burn and light a fire.”
His 11-year old son, two nephews, and two other boys their age walked about 10 meters from the tent and began searching through the rubble. “As soon as one of the kids pulled a piece of wood, something exploded. The children were thrown into the air—all of them,” Nour said. “I suddenly saw people flying—I didn’t even realize they were our children. I ran toward them and found my son hanging on the fence, and my sister’s son and my brother’s son—all of them hanging there,” he added. “Their condition was terrible, terrible.”
Across Gaza, underneath the millions of tons of torn concrete, and twisted rebar, lie not only thousands of bodies, but thousands of unexploded munitions.
Nour’s sister, Ghadir Al-Anqar, rushed outside when she heard the blast. The air was filled with dust. “When I came out of the tent, my son was running and screaming. I didn’t recognize him—he was completely covered in shrapnel. His entire body was [cut with] shrapnel, and his face was blackened with ash and debris,” Al-Anqar told Drop Site. “I couldn’t recognize him—the only way I knew it was him was by the color of his shirt, his blue shirt.” They picked up the children and carried them in their arms to Shifa hospital.
When they arrived at Shifa hospital, Nour’s son Zein’s T-shirt was shredded by the blast and one of his pant legs had been ripped off, according to a video filmed by Ahmed Hattab. His clothes were covered in blood and his legs had large gashes where his flesh had been torn out. Al-Anqar’s son Joud’s face was blackened by dust, and the front of his blue T-shirt was soaked through with blood. Part of his calf was shredded. They were neither screaming nor crying as they were carried into the hospital—they were in shock. The three other boys, who were less severely wounded, were also brought in and laid down on the hospital floor or on metal cots without mattresses.
The next day, the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) called attention to the incident. “Yesterday, five children were reportedly injured, two of them very seriously, while encountering unexploded ordnance in rubble near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza,” the group said in a statement. “Following the ceasefire in Gaza, the explosive ordnance threat remains. As hundreds of thousands of displaced people and humanitarian personnel are on the move, the risk of encountering explosive ordnance increases.”
UNMAS had documented at least 52 Palestinians killed and 267 wounded by explosive ordnance in Gaza since October 2023. “We expect that this figure is significantly underreported,” Luke Irving, the head of UNMAS in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said in a press conference earlier this month. “Unfortunately, we can estimate that many more people have been injured or killed by ordnance littering Gaza over the past two years.”
Israel has dropped tens of thousands of tons of mostly U.S.-made bombs on Gaza, more than the combined weight of the bombs dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg in all of World War II. And UNMAS has warned that between 5-10% of weapons fired into Gaza have failed to detonate, effectively turning the enclave into a minefield.
In the press conference, Irving said UNMAS was “deeply concerned about the heightened risk these items pose in the coming days, weeks, months and years” as people in Gaza sort through the rubble and begin to rebuild.
The Israeli news site, The Marker—the financial supplement to Haaretz—reported that the Israeli Air Force was aware of at least 3,000 unexploded bombs in Gaza as of April 2025. So far, UNMAS has been able to identify at least 560 unexploded ordnance in areas the group has been able to access. “However, we will not know the full extent of the contamination in Gaza until and unless a comprehensive survey can take place,” Irving said. “The threats will increase as people move around, and especially when construction, reconstruction, and recovery efforts start.”
In Gaza City on Tuesday, a solitary bulldozer worked to clear piles of rubble off of Al-Nasr street to make it passable again, pushing the debris to the sides in large mounds before scooping it up and dumping it into a waiting truck. Residents used brooms to sweep smaller bits of concrete away from the fronts of the few standing buildings. Men scavenged through the rubble, searching for firewood, or anything they could salvage.
“Honestly, we were shocked by the extent of the damage between the first displacement and the second. After the second displacement, the destruction was total. The area looked terrifying, like something out of a horror movie,” Mohammad Mushtaha, a displaced resident who returned to Gaza City after the ceasefire, told Drop Site. “The streets were all blocked…We walked until we reached home. It was difficult because of the rocks and metal. There were also things like explosives or remnants that hadn’t detonated, so we were afraid to walk—scared of what might be on the roads.”
Along with its continued bombings and shootings of Palestinians on an almost daily basis since the ceasefire went into effect, Israel has prevented the minimum amount of humanitarian aid, equipment, and resources from entering Gaza in violation of the agreement, making it nearly impossible to begin dealing with the vast amounts of unexploded ordnance that have turned Gaza’s geography into a lethal landscape.
“We are talking about 71,000 tons of explosives currently present in the Gaza Strip,” Mahmoud Bassal, the spokesperson for Civil Defense, told Drop Site. “These explosives still exist, and at any moment they could explode,” he said. “It could happen when children tamper with them, or while civil defense teams work to recover bodies. A collision might happen and could lead to an explosion.”
Civil Defense teams are not tasked with removing unexploded ordnance but do help in coordination efforts and are the primary group in Gaza working on trying to retrieve the thousands of bodies buried under the rubble. “The Israeli occupation has killed 90 percent of the engineering unit’s personnel that used to operate in Gaza. The occupation destroyed the resources needed to transport these bomb remnants from one area to another,” Bassal said. “The current demand now is that specialized teams must be formed to address this issue, and they must be provided with the necessary equipment, capabilities, and vehicles to transport these highly explosive and large missiles that remain in Gaza.”
He added: “It is truly intolerable for these explosives to remain inside the Strip. [Along] with the corpses, with the rubble… there are explosives that threaten the lives of the population, and this is indeed a major problem in the Strip.”
More than two weeks after the explosion, Zein and Joud are still recovering in Al-Shifa hospital. Their bodies are covered in cuts and burns, and their legs and parts of their hands and fingers are wrapped in thick bandages.
“I wish it had been me instead of the children. It was a tragedy. This was one of the violations of the occupation,” Nour said. “It was extremely difficult for us. Seeing the children hurt was like a thunderbolt hitting our hearts.”