“I was afraid of my own memories”

At some of the many thousands of funerals in Gaza over the past 15 months, mourners have placed a bright orange vest over the body.

Vests are usually well worn and marked with dust, sometimes blood. They belong to the Civil Defense, the main emergency service in Gaza.

During the Israeli bombing, the Civil Defense was responsible for removing the living and the dead from the rubble. Along with Gaza ambulances, rescuers have taken on some of the most harrowing work in the Strip.

And they have paid a high price. In the first full day of peace on Monday, the agency said 99 of its rescuers were killed and 319 injured, some with life-changing injuries.

When Civil Defense buries its own, where possible, vests of the dead are placed over their bodies.

“We put the vest there because our colleague sacrificed his life in it,” Nuh al-Shagnobi, a 24-year-old rescuer, said in a telephone interview from Gaza City.

“We hope this will show God that this man has done good with his life, that he has saved others.”

Israel has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians in Gaza during the conflict – mostly women and children – and wounded more than 111,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are trusted by the United Nations. A recent study published by the Lancet medical journal found that the death toll in the first nine months of the war may have been underestimated by more than 40%.

The fragile truce that went into effect last weekend is holding. But for Civil Defense rescuers, the next stage of the work is just beginning.

The agency estimates that there are more than 10,000 people buried under the vast sea of ​​rubble in Gaza. The figure is based on information collected during the war about who was in each building destroyed by Israel and who the agency knows has already been discovered.

In areas that were fully occupied by Israeli forces at the time of the destruction, they lack detailed information and rely on residents to help them. In the Tell el-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City on Tuesday, rescuer Al-Shagnobi found a man with information about the fate of a flattened residential building.

“He told us that seven dead were found, but there was an elderly gentleman, a child and a baby left behind,” Al-Shagnobi said.

“Luckily there was a private bulldozer nearby and we were able to dig out the top layer of rubble,” he said. “And underneath we found three skeletons that matched the description.”

Al-Shagnobi gained a large following during the war by sharing his experiences on social media. Although he pixelates some images, others show the horrors he and other young rescuers faced.

One video shows him under the rubble, carefully removing the body of a baby from the body of another toddler who was alive. Other images he sent to the BBC show the extreme nature of the rescue work.

“You have to become numb over time,” Al-Shagnobi said during a shift in Gaza City. “But I got even worse. I feel more pain, not less. It’s harder for me to deal with. I saw 50 of my colleagues die before my eyes. Who outside of Gaza can imagine that?”

As the first Israeli hostages were released from Gaza last week, in exchange for 90 Palestinians from Israeli prisons, Israeli officials described the extensive psychological support awaiting the returning hostages.

But for those experiencing horrors in Gaza, such support is extremely limited. None of the four rescuers who spoke to the BBC this week from Gaza said they had been offered counselling.

“We all need this,” said Mohammed Lafi, a 25-year-old rescuer in Gaza City, “but no one is talking about it.”

Laffey, who has been with the agency for six years, has a wife and an infant son at home. “When I pull a baby’s body out of the rubble, I scream to myself if it’s the same age as my son. My body is shaking.”

Even if counseling were widely available, “a year of therapy wouldn’t be enough for a day on this job,” said Abdullah al-Majdalawi, a 24-year-old Civil Defense worker who lives with his parents in Gaza City.

Al-Majdalawi said that when he returned to his home between shifts, he was constantly doing odd jobs and household chores “because I became afraid of my own memories.”

“I’m very lonely now,” he said. “I don’t really talk to others about what I’ve seen. But I feel like my whole body is getting tight and I need some therapy because things are building up.”

Civil Defense workers began to be seen as heroes on the outside, Al-Majdalawi said. “But they don’t see what’s going on inside. Inside, I’m waging a war against myself.”

As the ceasefire began, new images from inside Gaza showed scenes of near-total destruction, particularly in the northern part of the enclave. Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal said the agency hopes to pull the remaining dead from under the rubble within 100 days, but he acknowledged that is a difficult goal because they still have virtually no bulldozers and other heavy equipment.

Civil defense has accused Israel of deliberately targeting and destroying vehicles and equipment in strikes, a charge Israel denies. Rescue workers told the BBC they were currently working with simple hand tools such as hammers and had few working vehicles. “We have so little equipment that we need another Civil Defense to save the Civil Defense,” Al-Majdalawi said.

A spokesman for the agency said on Friday that they had only been able to retrieve 162 bodies since the ceasefire began nearly a week ago.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Aid OCHA warned that recovering the bodies could take years due to a lack of equipment, personnel and what it said was 37 million tonnes of debris littered with unexploded bombs and hazardous materials such as asbestos.

The timing of many of the dead also hinders the identification process. At the European Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza this week, people searched for loved ones among the remains brought to the hospital and laid outside on white sheets. In many cases, the only option was to search for shoes, clothes or other personal belongings.

“I believe I will recognize my son immediately, even if his face has no features and he is just a skeleton,” Ali Ashour, a university professor, said of his 18-year-old son Mahjood.

“I will recognize him because I am his father and I know him better than a million people,” he said.

Ashour still held out hope that Mahjoud might have been captured, he said, but planned to search for the dead every day until he found out. “Whenever they bring more remains, I will come,” he said. “And if I see my son, I will pick him up from among the other bodies and carry him away.”

Nisrin Shaaban is searching for her 16-year-old son, Moatasem, who she says left their home in Beit Hanoun for 15 minutes and never returned.

“I opened every shroud in here, looking for the clothes he was wearing, trying to smell him,” she said. She was surrounded by human remains. “I feel like I’m living in a graveyard,” she said. “It’s a city of horrors.”

The Civil Defense Agency estimates that nearly 3,000 people may have been incinerated in the bombing, depriving some families of an end to their search. But there is much more than that that still needs to be recovered.

“These people must be found and honored,” said Al-Shagnobi, the rescuer. “This job is waiting for us. All we need is equipment and we will do it.”

Mu’at Al-Khatib and Amr Ahmad Tabash contributed to this report.