An armed Palestinian man looks on as an excavator is used to dig deep into the ground, reportedly searching for bodies in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. AFP
Speaking on Saturday, Irving stressed that as the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas takes hold, displaced families are returning to heavily pulverised areas they were forced to flee during the two-year-old Israeli genocidal war on the strip, placing them directly in the path of deadly, uncleared remnants of Israeli bombardment.
He emphasised that the process of clearing these unexploded munitions will be immensely lengthy and complex, calling for urgent financial and technical support to bolster the critical efforts of Palestinian civil society and non-governmental organisations working to raise risk awareness on the ground.
UNMAS is expanding its operations, which have been active since 2009, to meet the rising movement of vulnerable civilians.
The current, fragile halt in hostilities came into effect on 10 October 2025, marking the end of the longest and most destructive campaign in the history of the Israeli occupation of the occupied Palestinian territories.
This ceasefire, brokered under international pressure, offers a momentary reprieve for the two million people trapped in the enclave, but it simultaneously forces them to navigate a lethal landscape of their ruined homes.
For Palestinians, the return is not a homecoming, but a desperate search for any recognizable fragment of their former lives, fraught with the constant, unseen threat of detonation.
The scale of the Israeli military assault is staggering. From October 2023 to October 2025, the Israeli army saturated the tiny coastal strip with an unprecedented amount of explosives. Military analyses estimate that approximately 70,000 tonnes of bombs and missiles were dropped on Gaza’s densely packed neighbourhoods.
This relentless, indiscriminate campaign has obliterated civilian infrastructure and erased entire districts, translating into a collective punishment that has rendered the enclave fundamentally unlivable for its indigenous population.
This relentless destruction has created a monumental environmental disaster. According to estimates from the UN and humanitarian organisations, the total volume of debris and rubble now littering the Gaza Strip is conservatively estimated to be between 65 million and 70 million tonnes.
This is an unparalleled mass of pulverized concrete, steel, and toxic waste, often mixed with the remains of human bodies, turning the territory into a contaminated wasteland where the simplest movement, let alone reconstruction, becomes an existential challenge.
The human cost of this deliberate campaign is devastating. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, the cumulative casualty toll since October 2023 has reached over 67,100 fatalities and more than 169,800 injuries, most of them women and children.
Figures compiled by the UN, WHO, and UNICEF further highlight the atrocity, noting that nearly 42,000 people have sustained life-altering injuries, including over 5,000 traumatic amputations, predominantly affecting children.
These figures paint a grim portrait of a community systematically dismembered and traumatized.
Exacerbating the crisis is the invisible threat of unexploded ordnance (UXO). Gaza officials estimate that there are at least 20,000 undetonated bombs, missiles, and artillery shells scattered across the strip.
UNMAS has repeatedly warned that between five and ten per cent of the munitions fired failed to explode upon impact, turning every school, hospital, and former residential building into a booby-trapped grave.
These silent killers pose an immediate and enduring threat to every returning Palestinian family and every emergency worker.
Experts project that the immense task of fully clearing the rubble and neutralizing the pervasive explosive contamination will require a sustained, international effort lasting over a decade.
While some estimates suggest 10 years just to clear the debris, others predict that safely rendering all unexploded ordnance harmless could take up to 14 years.
This staggering timeline means that the dangerous legacy of Israel’s genocidal war will continue to endanger and define the lives of the Palestinian people for a generation.
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