JERUSALEM: The United Nations' aid chief took stock of the monumental task of restoring basic necessities in the devastated Gaza Strip on Saturday, as Israel and Hamas exchanged more human remains.
In a short convoy of white UN jeeps, relief coordinator Tom Fletcher and his team wound their way through the twisted rubble of shattered homes to inspect a wastewater treatment plant in Sheikh Radwan, north of Gaza City.
"I drove through here seven to eight months ago when most of these buildings were still standing and, to see the devastation, this is a vast part of the city, just a wasteland, and it's absolutely devastating to see," he said.
Just over a week since US President Donald Trump helped broker a truce, the main border crossing to Egypt has yet to be reopened, but hundreds of trucks roll in daily via Israeli checkpoints and aid is being distributed.
Hamas has returned the final 20 surviving hostages it was holding and has begun to hand over the remains of another 28 who died.
On Friday night, it turned over a body identified by Israel as Eliyahu Margalit, 75, who died in the October 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war in Gaza. On Saturday, in line with the terms of the ceasefire deal, Israel returned the bodies of 15 more Palestinians to Gaza, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved the ceasefire but is under pressure at home to restrict access to Gaza until the remaining bodies of the hostages taken during Hamas's brutal attacks have been returned.
On Saturday, his office confirmed that the latest body, returned by Hamas via the Red Cross on Friday night, had been identified as Margalit, an elderly farmer who was known to his friends at the Nir Oz kibbutz as "Churchill".
Meanwhile, Gaza's civil defence agency said that Israeli forces killed nine members of a single Palestinian family when they fired on a bus on Friday, after the military confirmed it had targeted a vehicle that crossed the so-called "yellow line".
"Civil defence crews were able to recover nine bodies following the Israeli occupation's targeting of a bus carrying displaced persons east of the Zeitun neighbourhood yesterday," Mahmud Bassal, a spokesman for the agency, which operates under Hamas authority, said on Saturday.
Bassal said the victims were members of the Abu Shabaan family and were killed while "trying to check on their home" in the Zeitun neighbourhood.
The Israeli military said a vehicle had been identified crossing the "yellow line", the boundary behind which Israeli troops are stationed under the ceasefire agreement with Hamas.
"The troops fired warning shots toward the suspicious vehicle, but the vehicle continued to approach the troops in a way that caused an imminent threat to them," the military said in a statement.
Relief agencies have called for the Rafah border crossing from Egypt to be reopened to speed the flow of food, fuel and medicines, and Türkiye has a team of rescue specialists waiting at the border to help find bodies in the rubble.
Some violent incidents have taken place despite the ceasefire. Gaza's civil defence agency, which operates under Hamas authority, said on Saturday that it had recovered the bodies of nine Palestinians from the Shaaban family after Israeli troops opened fire on a bus. — AFP
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