Unexploded ordnances left by Israel in Gaza pose a constant danger to Palestinians
Khuloud Rabah Sulaiman reports in Mondoweiss on 3 October 2026:
On November 23, 2025, Adham al-Firy, 28, from Gaza City’s al-Nasr Neighborhood, found a small object weighing about 1.5 kilograms while working to clear rubble from buildings destroyed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. After searching online, it appeared to be a scooter battery, so he decided to take it home and use it for electricity and internet access amid the city’s ongoing electricity blackouts.
At about 7:00 p.m., he brought the object into his family’s second-floor apartment in their four-story building. He placed it on a table in the living room, where nine family members were gathered. Shortly afterward, his 18-month-old son, Yahya, carried the object and walked towards his father, who watched in fear that the child might drop it on himself.
“My son took one step, a second step, and then suddenly the object exploded,” he recalled. My son was thrown into the air before my eyes, and then everything went dark.”
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Lacking experts and proper equipment
Since October 7, 2023, over 200,000 tonnes of explosive ordnance were dropped on the Strip by Israel, with about 70,000 tonnes remaining unexploded, according to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defence.
Last April, the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) reported that 1,000 people had been killed due to “indirect conflict from the remnants of war since the start of the attack,” which Basal attributed to the loss of explosive ordnance engineers and the lack of equipment needed to identify and safely dispose of unexploded ordnance (UXO) contaminated in debris.
About 90 percent of those engineers have been killed, he said, either at home or while carrying out what he describes as “humanitarian work”, leaving the city without experts capable of conducting full UXO operations from detection and surveying to safe disposal.