The Egyptian army search-and-rescue team that entered war-torn Gaza late on Saturday has an unenviable job. Equipped with heavy machinery, the soldiers are tasked with finding the remains of deceased Israeli hostages. If the sheer amount of wreckage left by Israel’s two-year assault was not enough for these troops to reckon with, the estimated 20,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance scattered across the enclave make their challenging mission a potentially deadly one.
In addition to the many hardships the people of Gaza have to endure, their home is now littered with unclaimed mines, IEDs and rockets. Over the years, other parts of the Middle East have been left with their own toxic legacies.
Decades of conflict in Iraq mean the border with Iran remains riddled with landmines. Elsewhere, unexploded bombs have rendered farmland in many Iraqi provinces unusable. In urban centres such as Fallujah and Mosul, hidden devices pose a threat to civilians. In neighbouring Syria, too, aerial bombs and cluster munitions lie in wait on roads and in fields to kill and injure the unwary. In all cases, curious children are the most at risk; minors have made up almost half of all civilian casualties recorded by the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor since 1999.
Much has been said and written about so-called day-after planning for Gaza. That “day after” is in some ways already here, and the deadly detritus from Israel’s latest campaign of collective punishment now threatens to compromise international efforts to stabilise the Palestinian enclave. This is because unexploded ordnance compounds so many other problems. The presence of lurking materiel makes clearing debris more dangerous. Agricultural land infested with the remnants of war cannot be farmed safely, exacerbating Gaza’s food crisis. Critically, such ordinance makes the task of recovering bodies even more perilous; further delays in locating the remains of Israeli hostages threaten to derail the delicate US-brokered truce. Palestinian families also want to find their loved ones.
All this makes the presence of the Egyptian specialists a welcome development - as well as searching for hostage remains, the team will also help to defuse unexploded ordnance. In addition, a plan drawn up by Gaza’s authorities will set up teams to comb through destroyed neighbourhoods, marking danger zones and isolating explosives when possible. But more needs to be done, and quickly.
As in Iraq, where the UN Mine Action Service removed more than 18,000 explosive remnants of war this year alone, as many Gazan civilians as possible must be trained to identify, mark and report ordnance threats. In Yemen, Project Masam – a Saudi-led demining effort – operates under an instructive humanitarian model. As opposed to military demining, which focuses on securing bases and transport routes for soldiers, Project Masam is designed to restore safe access to roads, schools, farmland and water points. Such efforts in Gaza will also need to prioritise safety, documentation and long-term monitoring.
There are also lessons to be learnt from conflicts that are further afield, such as the war in Ukraine. In that country, drones and AI-enabled imaging technology are being used to find, tag and remove unexploded devices, cutting down the need for manual searching and defusing. Clearance missions that once took years can be completed much more quickly. It is this kind of innovative and creative thinking that must be applied to Gaza. A failure to do so could cost lives and delay the critical work of rebuilding people’s homes and lives.
