Israel is compacting and clearing the rubble of Gaza, and bodies may still be lying under it. That is the finding of a CBC News visual investigation, which used satellite imagery to examine several destroyed neighbourhoods in once-populated areas. The analysis shows rubble and debris being removed to make way for new military outposts for Israeli forces. Families say the clearing stops them from recovering the remains of their dead, and United Nations officials have warned in recent weeks that the rubble — and whoever is beneath it — is not being handled properly.
The legal stakes are plain. In 2024 the International Criminal Court ordered Israel to take measures to preserve evidence of alleged violations of the UN Genocide Convention in Gaza. “It is Israel’s obligation under international law to do everything possible to ensure these remains are found, identified and buried with dignity,” said Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN human rights office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The war, now almost three years old, was sparked by the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023.
In a statement to CBC News, the Israel Defense Forces said it clears structures and dismantles infrastructure in Gaza “based on tactical necessity” and to “reduce the level of risk posed” to its troops, activity it says is “carried out in accordance with operational necessity, the provisions of international law, and IDF directives.” It denies failing to preserve evidence or recover remains, saying it “treats every body found in the area with respect and seriousness.” The families CBC spoke to say no one contacted them about retrieving the bodies before or after the rubble was taken away from their homes.
Dalal Faraj lived in Shuja’iya, a neighbourhood of Gaza City. In October 2023, as the war picked up pace, her husband Taha, 48, and her son Nasr, 16, told her to take their five younger children somewhere safer; they said they would catch up. On 8 October 2023, a day after the war started, an Israeli strike hit the house. She has not heard from her husband or son since. She now lives with her children in a displacement camp.
Where are the bodies? Where are the houses? Where’s the rubble?
Faraj spoke those words after a CBC freelance videographer, Mohamed El Saife, showed her satellite footage of her former neighbourhood. The images the CBC team gathered show the buildings that stood there are all gone, and a new Israeli military base was built on the cleared ground. On 10 March 2026 a satellite captured a clearing operation nearby: the team identified ten diggers and one truck just north of the family home. A month later, imagery shows four diggers clearing terrain west of it. “Impossible … This is our area?” she said. “Where did the houses go? Where are my husband and son?” She had waited years to return, recover Taha and Nasr’s remains and rebuild; seeing the pictures broke the last of her hope, she said. “This area used to be my home. We used to live in a safe place. We would go to school, go out and have fun. Suddenly, this happened.”
CBC News asked the IDF how many bodies found under Gaza’s rubble since last year’s ceasefire have been returned to Palestinians. It did not answer the question.
Shaher Mohamed Abu Ouda, 36, lived in a settlement in the Rafah Governorate known as the “Swedish Village”. He says fourteen members of his family are still missing after the family home in southern Gaza was destroyed. “Warplanes started shooting at us, then came the F-16s, it shot at the house which we were in,” he told CBC. “I left by a miracle.” He left the area in 2024; Israel occupied Rafah in 2025. “Until today, I think about what happened that day,” he said. “I thought I would go back and see them, but after all these years, I won’t even find a blouse.”
Comparison images of his home’s location show the rubble still there until at least June 2026; footage from May 2026 shows six vehicles removing it. By August 2026 the rubble was gone, heavy-machinery tracks crossed the ground, and the latest satellite imagery shows the neighbourhood completely flattened with a military base on top. Abu Ouda said he was not surprised, because Rafah has been under Israeli control for years, but the images confirmed he is unlikely to recover his family’s remains. “Fourteen people lost their lives and we still know nothing about them,” he said. “Even the rubble is not there.”
Júlia Nueno Guitart, a researcher at Forensic Architecture, an independent research group tracking developments in Gaza, confirmed CBC’s findings. Her group has collected more than 2,000 similar incidents and confirmed 43 cases “where people have remained under the rubble”, she said — through visual evidence, through graffiti on the walls of buildings where people remain, and through reports from Gaza’s Civil Defence of bodies that cannot be retrieved. The Israeli military, her group’s findings say, is compacting and clearing rubble around new bases even where bodies are still underneath. “What we are seeing after the ceasefire in Gaza is a new type of destruction, different to the one we have been documenting before the ceasefire,” she said.
Janina Dill, an Oxford professor and an expert on international law, sets out the test. Removing rubble and flattening a bombed area is compatible with international law only if the war dead are collected, identified and buried, and if the evidence needed to prosecute potential war crimes is preserved. “If [the rubble removal] is done without taking care of these two considerations, then it is absolutely prohibited and incompatible with Israel’s obligations under the Geneva Convention,” she said.
The diggers do not answer questions and the army answers only some of them. On the satellite passes the neighbourhood is a patch of bare ground, and the families know, within a few metres, where it used to stand.