unexploded

Israeli restrictions on the entry of heavy machinery are crippling Gaza City’s efforts to clear debris and rebuild critical infrastructure, the city’s mayor says, as tens of thousands of tonnes of unexploded Israeli bombs threaten lives across the Gaza Strip.

In a Sunday news conference, Mayor Yahya al-Sarraj said Gaza City requires at least 250 heavy vehicles and 1,000 tonnes of cement to maintain water networks and construct wells.

Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary, reporting from az-Zawayda in Gaza, said only six trucks had entered the territory.

At least 9,000 Palestinians remain buried under the rubble. But the new equipment is being prioritised for recovering the remains of Israeli captives, rather than assisting Palestinians in locating their loved ones still trapped beneath rubble.

“Palestinians say they know there won’t be any developments in the ceasefire until the bodies of all the Israeli captives are returned,” Khoudary said.

Footage circulating on social media showed Red Cross vehicles arriving after meetings with Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, to guide them to the location of an Israeli captive in southern Rafah.

An Israeli government spokesperson said that to search for captives’ remains, the Red Cross and Egyptian teams have been permitted beyond the ceasefire’s “yellow line”, which allows Israel to retain control over 58 percent of the besieged enclave.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman, said Israel spent two weeks insisting that Hamas knew the locations of all the captives’ bodies.

“Two weeks into that, Israel has now allowed Egyptian teams and heavy machinery to enter the Gaza Strip to assist in the mammoth task of removing debris, of trying to get to the tunnels or underneath the homes or structures that the captives were held in and killed in,” she said.

Odeh added that Hamas had been unable to access a tunnel for two weeks due to the damage caused by Israeli bombing. “That change of policy is coming without explanation from Israel,” she said, noting that the Red Cross and Hamas have also been allowed to help locate potential burial sites under the rubble.

Netanyahu: ‘We control Gaza’

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to reassert political authority at home, saying that Israel controls which foreign forces may operate in Gaza.

“We control our own security, and we have made clear to international forces that Israel will decide which forces are unacceptable to us – and that is how we act and will continue to act,” he said. “This is, of course, accepted by the United States, as its most senior representatives expressed in recent days.”

Odeh explained that Netanyahu’s statements are intended to reassure the far-right base in Israel, which thinks he’s no longer calling the shots.

Those currently overseeing the ceasefire do not appear to be Israeli soldiers or army leadership, she explained, with Washington “requesting that Israel notify it ahead of time of any attack that Israel might be planning to conduct inside Gaza”.

Odeh noted that Israel’s insistence on controlling which foreign actors operate in Gaza – combined with the limited access for reconstruction – underscores a broader strategy to maintain political support at home.

Unexploded bombs a threat

Reconstruction in Gaza faces further obstacles from unexploded ordnance. Nicholas Torbet, Middle East director at HALO Trust in the United Kingdom, said Gaza is “essentially one giant city” where every part has been struck by explosives.

“Some munitions are designed to linger, but what we’re concerned about in Gaza is ordnance that is expected to explode upon impact but hasn’t,” he told Al Jazeera.

Torbet said clearing explosives is slowing the reconstruction process. His teams plan to work directly within communities to safely remove bombs rather than marking off large areas indefinitely. “The best way to dispose of a bomb is to use a small amount of explosives to blow it up,” he explained.

Torbet added that the necessary equipment is relatively simple and can be transported in small vehicles or by hand, and progress is beginning to take place.

The scale of explosives dropped by Israel has left Gaza littered with deadly remnants.

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence, told Al Jazeera that Israel dropped at least 200,000 tonnes of explosives on the territory, with roughly 70,000 tonnes failing to detonate.

Children have been particularly affected, often mistaking bombs for toys. Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili reported the case of seven-year-old Yahya Shorbasi and his sister Nabila, who were playing outside when they found what appeared to be a toy.

“They found a regular children’s toy – just an ordinary one. The girl was holding it. Then the boy took it and started tapping it with a coin. Suddenly, we heard the sound of an explosion. It went off in their hands,” their mother Latifa Shorbasi told Al Jazeera.

Yahya’s right arm had to be amputated, while Nabila remains in intensive care.

Dr Harriet, an emergency doctor at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, described the situation as “a public health catastrophe waiting to unfold”. She said children are being injured by items that look harmless – toys, cans, or debris – but are actually live explosives.

United Nations Mine Action Service head Luke David Irving said 328 people have already been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance since October 2023.

Tens of thousands of tonnes of bombs, including landmines, mortar rounds, and large bombs capable of flattening concrete buildings, remain buried across Gaza. Basal said clearing the explosives could take years and require millions of dollars.

For Palestinians, the situation is a race against time. Al Jazeera’s Khoudary said civilians are pressing for faster progress: “They want reconstruction, they want freedom of movement, and they want to see and feel that the ceasefire is going to make it.”

June 4 (UPI) — More than 20,000 people in Germany were evacuated as authorities worked Wednesday to defuse three huge unexploded bombs from World War II at a construction site in the center of the city.

A major incident was declared due to the danger from the bombs — two 2,200 lb devices and one of 1,100 lbs — with police making checks door-to-door in the Old Town and Deutz areas of Cologne after 20,500 people were ordered to leave and businesses, tourist attractions and stations were shuttered, the city said in a news release.

The 1,100-yard-wide exclusion zone covers the city’s UNESCO-listed 13th-century cathedral, 58 hotels, parts of the subway system, at least nine schools, day care centers, two retirement homes, a hospital, as well as city hall and many other sites.

“The evacuation is the largest measure since the end of the Second World War. Everyone involved hopes that the defusing can be completed in the course of Wednesday,” city authorities said.

“This is only possible if all those affected leave their homes or workplaces early and stay outside the evacuation area from the outset on that day. We ask you to be cooperative and follow our instructions so that the evacuation and defusing can proceed quickly and without danger.”

Officials told Sky News the measures could remain in force for some time if the effort to defuse the devices was unsuccessful and it became necessary to detonate them, as that would require a major operation to contain the blast.

All three bombs are American-made, but likely dropped by the Royal Air Force, which dropped around 1.5 million bombs in raids on Cologne between 1940 and 1945, some of them with as many as 1,000 aircraft, launched from bases in eastern England.

However, as many as 300,000 of the bombs did not explode, according to experts, causing frequent scares when they turn up during construction projects or in dredging of the River Rhine, which runs through the heart of the city.

Last year alone, more than 30 were discovered, forcing 17 evacuations affecting 36,000 people. The bombs were among around 2,000 that are found across Germany each year, according to the Smithsonian Magazine.

In 2021, four people were injured in Munich when a World War II bomb exploded during construction work near the main train station and more than 65,000 people were evacuated in Frankfurt in 2017 after a “Blockbuster” 1.4-ton British bomb was found near Goethe University. That device was safely defused.

German bombs are frequently discovered in Britain, which was heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe between 1940 and 1941 and in 1944, most recently last year when 10,000 people were evacuated after a large bomb was found in the yard of a suburban property in Plymouth.

Naval and army bomb disposal officers extracted the device and took it out to sea, where it was detonated.