GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — "The other boys told me they were buckets of lentils," recalls 8-year-old Joud Ahmad Al Angar. He's talking about the container of small black pellets he and his cousins found in the rubble near their tent in Gaza City.
His 12-year-old cousin Zain Nour thought the pellets looked like chunks of coal. Perhaps they could help start a fire so that their parents could cook dinner. Whatever it was, the boys reasoned, maybe it could help their families in some way.
"When we brought it back to the tent," says Zain, "the adults said, 'Go return that to where you found it,' so my cousin tossed it, and then it exploded."
Phone video captured immediately after the explosion and shared with NPR by a family member shows Zain and Joud staggering from the scene of the blast, both of them screaming and covered in blood. Zain's father Mohammad Nour was the first on the scene.
"The kids went flying through the air," he remembers. "We found each of them in a different place. I found my son hanging on a fence, bleeding. Both of them had shrapnel lodged in their bodies. And they were covered in dust. My son was crying for me."
Two days later, Zain and Joud share a bed in a room crowded with other patients in Gaza City's Al-Shifa Hospital. Their hair is covered in dust and their bodies are blackened by the blast. Dime-sized scabs from the black pellet shrapnel cover their little bodies. The larger reddish wounds ooze white pus. Joud's scalp was ripped open and sewed shut with rudimentary stitches.
"When we arrived to the hospital, it was out of painkillers and there weren't many doctors to help us," says Mohammad Nour. "Finally we found some medicine and were able to clean their wounds, but because there aren't any surgeons left in northern Gaza, we're waiting for operations to remove the rest of the shrapnel from their bodies."
The undetonated explosives his son and nephew found, says Nour, are "all over the place here in Gaza. We've lost our home and we're afraid to move from one place to another because they're everywhere. The rubble is full of them and they're often exploding."
The United Nations Mine Action Service estimates between 5% and 10% of Israeli weapons fired into Gaza in the past two years have failed to detonate, leaving behind unexploded ordnance that has killed at least 328 people — 24 since the current ceasefire began on Oct. 10.
"We receive daily calls from citizens reporting unexploded bombs," says Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson of Civil Defense in Gaza. "They're in buildings, under buildings, on roofs, and on the roads, and these include enormous war missiles, missiles from drones, bombs, the list goes on."
Basal estimates there are tens of thousands of tons of unexploded bombs littered throughout Gaza from the two-year war.
"The problem is," he says, "90% of my colleagues who were capable of defusing these bombs have been killed in Israeli attacks."
That leaves specialists like Nick Orr to locate Gaza's unexploded ordnance. He's chief of operations for the nonprofit Humanity and Inclusion in Gaza.
Orr says his job is not going to be easy in such a densely populated place like Gaza, where he will need to cordon off a safety zone and evacuate people each time a bomb is found. "We can't hold a cordon or create an evacuation eclipse inside of Gaza," he says, exasperated. "There's 2.4 million people. I would need an 800-meter cordon in Gaza City. Can you imagine how that could be achieved right now with all the will in the world? It's impossible."
Postwar Gaza finds itself in a scenario that the world has not seen for decades, he says. "It's biblical," he says. "And if you look at World War II photographs of Berlin and Paris and London, it's exactly the same thing."
As it happens, construction crews in heavily bombed cities in World War II like Berlin still regularly find unexploded ordnance 80 years later. Orr believes it will take a similar chunk of time to clear Gaza.
"You could probably clear the surface in 20 or 30 years, but you're still going to be finding things on the ground for two to three generations — and probably in the fossil record — with an amount of contamination that's down there now," he says.
Orr says before he and his team can begin to safely clear these bombs from Gaza, there needs to be some kind of internal security force to help move people out of their homes so that the work can be done. But at the moment there is no such force. President Trump's peace plan includes the formation of an international stabilization force, but that could be months in the making.
"And then I think it's going to be like a patchwork quilt where we will geographically move to an area, we will serve an evacuation notice, tell the people and then we give them the responsibility to move," Orr says. "But we also have got to give them somewhere to move to."
And that, says Orr, will mean more internally displaced persons' camps that Gazans are already all too familiar with from two years of bombardment.
A high-ranking official in the unexploded ordnance division of Gaza's interior ministry who is not authorized to speak publicly told NPR that under the U.S.-brokered ceasefire plan, unexploded bombs are being treated as part of the disarmament of Hamas because Hamas often recycles these bombs to be used against Israel. As such, this official said, Israel's military is targeting any Gaza civilians who try to handle Gaza's unexploded bombs.
The official told NPR that Israel and Hamas have agreed to allow Egyptian teams to manage the cleanup of Gaza's unexploded ordnance. When asked to confirm this with NPR, a spokesperson for Israel's military responded by text message with "no comment."
Back at Gaza City's Al-Shifa hospital, Zain Nour and his cousin Joud Ahmad Al Angar say they'll think twice before scavenging again amongst the rubble of Gaza for food and other useful items for their families. It's an activity that has become commonplace in Gaza, where more than 64,000 children have either been killed or injured in the past two years, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The boys say they've learned their lesson.
"We are now too scared to go poking around near bombed-out buildings," says Joud, his face full of scabs and stitches. "Next time," he says, "we will stay far, far away."
Anas Baba reported from Gaza City. Rob Schmitz reported from Tel Aviv, Israel. Ahmed Abuhamda contributed to this report from Cairo and Jawak Rizkallah contributed from Beirut.
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