How Israel’s Gaza bombings evaporated nearly 3,000 Palestinians without a trace
“I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?”
One of the worst massacres during Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza was the fajr massacre of August 10, 2024. The bombing, which killed over 100 Palestinians gathered for the morning prayers, was so intense that most of the bodies were torn to pieces. The families of the martyred were handed 70 kilos of human flesh for each martyr in plastic bags. However, this Israeli campaign of extermination of the Palestinians is so barbaric that even those carrying their loved ones in unrecognisable forms in shopping bags would consider themselves lucky, for there were several whose bodies were vapourised without a trace by the sheer impact of the bombs dropped by the Israelis.
Yasmin Mahani went looking for her son, Saad, at the mosque, but could not find a trace of him. “I went into the mosque and found myself stepping on flesh and blood,” Mahani told Al Jazeera Arabic in an investigative report. “We found nothing of Saad. Not even a body to bury. That was the hardest part.”
Rafiq Badran lost four of his children in another such Israeli bombing in the Bureij refugee camp. He couldn’t find anything of them to bury them. “Four of my children just evaporated,” Badran said. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?”
The Al Jazeera Arabic report has revealed that at least 2,842 Palestinians have been vapourised by the Israeli use of banned weapons during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for the Gaza Civil Defence, told the channel that those who were evaporated in these intense bombings left little trace, often just scalps, splatters of blood, and small pieces of flesh, highlighting a level of sustained, in-your-face savagery that has few parallels in history.
Basal revealed that the number 2,842, which his team has arrived at, is not a result of guesswork, but of diligent accounting. “We enter a targeted home and cross-reference the known number of occupants with the bodies recovered,” Basal said. “If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we treat the remaining two as ‘evaporated’ only after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces — blood spray on walls or small fragments like scalps,” he added.
Such extreme devastation is the result of the intense heat generated by the explosives packed into these US-made weapons, identified as the MK-84 ‘Hammer’, the BLU-109 bunker buster, and the GBU-39. These are packed with a mixture of explosive chemicals that raise their firepower up several notches. The temperature in the aftermath of explosions rises to up to 3,500 degrees Celsius (5,432 degrees Fahrenheit), which evaporates all the bodily fluids of those in the area of impact and reduces their tissues to ash.
Dr. Muneer al-Boursh, the director-general of the Health Ministry in Gaza, explained how these bombs cause bodies to entirely disappear without a trace. “The boiling point of water is 100 degrees Celsius [212 degrees Fahrenheit],” al-Boursh told Al Jazeera Arabic. “When a body is exposed to energy exceeding 3,000 degrees Celsius combined with massive pressure and oxidation, the fluids boil instantly. The tissues vapourise and turn to ash. It is chemically inevitable.”
One of these bombs was dropped in the Al-Mawasi camp in Khan Yunis on September 10, 2024 and created a huge crater, which the survivors equated to the aftermath of an earthquake. Twenty-two people were evaporated in this particular bombing.
A weapons expert explained in the Al Jazeera Arabic investigation that these thermobaric bombs — which are three to five times more powerful than conventional bombs — are typically used in crowded spaces and leave structures standing while annihilating humans unfortunate enough to be within their range, which extends upwards of several hundred feet.
Citing a paper, the investigation explained that these bombs “operate through three deadly stages: a super-heat wave, followed by violent pressure waves, then a fireball that spreads inside enclosed spaces and burns everything it reaches.”
While the use of such bombs in tightly packed civilian areas is forbidden under international law and constitutes clear war crimes, the Jewish supremacists in Israel have consistently demonstrated that they are not bound by international law or moral considerations in their campaign of the extermination of Palestinians from their lands.
The unfettered use of these banned weapons in a densely packed, besieged enclave, where half of the pre-genocide population of 2.3 million comprised children, goes to show how low a view the Israelis take of Palestinians. Dehumanised, brutalised, and relentlessly genocided for the past 28 months in full view of the world, Palestinians have endured what this latest documentation of Israeli barbarism underlines: a chilling and deliberate disregard for Palestinian life — a policy of sustained, systematic destruction carried out with total impunity, safe in the knowledge that no one will hold the perpetrators to account.
“Bodies left without a trace, 2,842,” Dr. al-Boursh lamented on Twitter. “No remains to carry, no shrouds to wrap, no graves to visit. Some became nothing more than a chemical trace in the air, a thermal shadow on a blackened wall.
“What kind of era turns a human being into vapor? What kind of civilization boasts about precision in killing while mothers sift through dust searching for fragments of their children?”
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Israel is a Terrorist State. cancel it.
Israel: Zero diversity within a society of monsters. Enormous diversity within a huge cache of weaponry to murder civilians (at least in some part paid for by US taxpayers).