“I became afraid of my memories.”

In some of the funerals held in Gaza during the past fifteen months, the mourners put a bright orange jacket on the body.

The jackets are usually well dressed, and dust appears, and sometimes blood. They belong to the civil defense, the main emergency service in Gaza.

Throughout the Israeli bombing, the civil defense was responsible for recovering the neighborhoods and the dead from under the rubble. Besides the ambulance service in Gaza, rescuers made some of the most intimidated work in the Strip.

They paid a heavy price. On the first full day of peace on Monday, the agency said that 99 rescue workers were killed and 319 were wounded, some of whom had changed their life.

When the civil defense bury their bodies, wherever the dead jackets can be placed on their bodies.

“We put the jacket there because our colleague sacrificed his spirit in it,” Noah Al -Shujnoubi, 24 -year -old rescue worker, said in an interview by phone from Gaza City.

“We hope that God will show that this man did good in his life, and that he saved others.”

Israel killed more than 47,000 Palestinians in Gaza during the conflict – most of them women and children – and hit more than 111,000, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health, whose United Nations considers reliable numbers. A recent study published by Lancet Medical Magazine found that the death toll during the first nine months of the war may be reduced by more than 40%.

The fragile ceasefire, which came into effect last weekend, remains steadfast. But for rescue workers in the civil defense, the next stage of their work has just started.

The agency appreciates that there are more than 10,000 people buried under the sea of ​​massive rubble across Gaza. This number is based on the information collected throughout the war about the people who were in every building destroyed by Israel, and the agency knows that they were already recovered.

In the areas occupied by the entire Israeli forces during the destruction, they do not have detailed information and depend on the population to help them. In the Tel Al -Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, the gnawi rescue worker found, on Tuesday, a man bearing information about the fate of a devastating residential building.

Al -Shujnoubi said: “We told us that seven people were recovered, but there was an elderly man, a child and an infant.”

He said: “Fortunately, there was a bulldozer owned by the private sector nearby and we were able to extract the upper layer of the rubble.” “We found three skeletons that match the description.”

Al -Shujnoubi has gained a large number of followers during the war by participating his experiences on social media. Although he divided some pictures, others show the atrocities that he and other rescue workers faced.

One of the videos appears under the rubble, and he carefully pulled the body of a baby around the body of another young child who is still alive. Other photos they sent to the BBC show the extremist nature of rescue work.

“You must have numbness over time,” Al -Shahanbi said during a working attack in Gaza City. “But my condition has become worse. I feel more pain, not less. I find it difficult to adapt. I have seen 50 of my colleagues die in front of me. Who can imagine this outside Gaza?”

With the release of the first Israeli hostages from Gaza last week, compared to 90 Palestinians from Israeli prisons, the Israeli authorities described the intensive psychological support that awaits the returning hostages.

But for those who suffer from atrocities in Gaza, this support is very limited. None of the four rescue workers who spoke to BBC this week from Gaza said that they had received advice.

“We all need this, but no one talks about it,” said Mohamed Lafi, 25 -year -old rescue worker in Gaza City.

Lafi, who has been working in the agency for six years, has a wife and a baby son at home. “When I take out the body of a child from under the rubble, I scream at myself if he was at the same age of my son. My body trembles.”

Abdullah Al -Majdalawi, a 24 -year -old civil defense worker who lives with his parents in Gaza City, said that even if the consultation is widely available, “a year of treatment will not be sufficient for one day in this job.”

Al -Majdalawi said that when he was returning to his home among the shifts, he was doing small work and homework constantly, “because I became afraid of my memories.”

He said, “I am very alone now.” “I am not really talking to others what I saw. But I feel that my whole body has become tight, and I need a kind of treatment because things accumulate.”

Al -Majdalawi said that civil defense workers were seen from abroad as heroes. “But they do not see what is happening inside. At home, I am fighting a war against myself.”

With the start of the ceasefire, new photos from inside Gaza showed scenes of almost complete destruction, especially in the northern Gaza Strip. Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bella said that the agency was hoping to retrieve the rest of the dead from under the rubble within 100 days, but he admitted that it was a difficult goal, because they had no actually bulldozers and other heavy equipment so far.

The Civil Defense accused Israel of targeting and deliberately destroying its vehicles and equipment in air strikes, which Israel denies. Rescue workers told the BBC that they are currently working with simple hand tools such as hammers, and they had a few operating vehicles. “We have very few equipment and we need another civil defense to save the civil defense.”

A spokesman for the agency said on Friday that they had managed to recover only 162 bodies since the ceasefire began about a week ago.

The United Nations Aid Coordination Office (OCHA) warned that the recovery of the bodies may take years due to the lack of equipment and employees, and an estimated 37 million tons of aggressors scattered with unexploded bombs and dangerous materials such as asbestos.

The amount of time that many dead spend also hinders the identification process. At the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, south of Gaza, people were searching this week for their loved ones among the remains that were brought to the hospital and placed abroad on white covers. In many cases, the only option was to search for shoes, clothes or other personal luggage.

“I think I will get to know my son immediately, even if his face was without features and he is just a skeleton,” said Ali Ashour, a university professor, on the authority of his 18 -year -old son, Mahjoub, said:

He said: “I will get to know him because I am his father and I know him better than a million people.”

He added that Ashour is still hoping that he would be embedded in captivity, but he planned to search the dead every day until he knows that. “Anytime they bring more remains, I will attend,” he said. “And if I see my son, I will take it out of the bodies and carry it away.”

Nisreen Shaaban was looking for her 16 -year -old son, Mutasim, who said he had left their house in Beit Hanoun for 15 minutes and never returned.

She said, “I opened all the shrouds here looking for the clothes he was wearing, and I am trying to smell it.” She was surrounded by human remains. She said, “I feel like I am living in a cemetery.” “It is the city of terror.”

The Civil Defense Agency estimates that nearly 3,000 people may have been burned in the bombing, which deprived some families of ending their research. But there are many who still need to recover.

“These people need to find and honor them,” said Al -Shujnoubi, the rescue worker. “This work is waiting for us. All we need is the equipment and we will do it.”

In this report, Moaz Al -Khatib and Amr Ahmed Tabash contributed to this report.