Bodies lie unclaimed and rats run rampant as months on Gaza’s ceasefire remains unfulfilled

By Sana Noor Haq, Ibrahim Dahman, Sarah Tamimi, Eyad Kourdi, CNN

(CNN) — Fourteen-year-old Karam dribbles a blue, yellow and white football down a sandy path in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.

“My dream was to become a footballer,” said Karam, who is displaced with his two brothers and sister. “I used to play with my friends in the street.

“Life before the war was beautiful. But now, there is no life,” he told CNN.

Around the teenager, Gaza’s deep blue, sea-tipped horizon has turned into a panorama of burned farmland, charred orchards and mountains of rubble.

As the US and Iran try to turn their truce into long-term peace, CNN has spoken to residents of the Strip who say they are living in the ashes of what they see as another impotent US-led deal. Israel has barred foreign journalists from independently reporting in Gaza since the start of the war.

Last fall, Israel and Hamas signed a two-phase agreement after two years of bombing and siege in Gaza following the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel.

Both parties have accused each other of violating the terms – which envision the eventual withdrawal of Israeli soldiers, the full disarmament of Hamas, the deployment of an international force and a new Palestinian governing body.

More than eight months on, there is little sign of progress. Instead, Gazans face a “dangerous status quo,” Nikolay Mladenov, a former UN official tasked with implementing the deal, warned in May. On Thursday the Board of Peace created to advance the ceasefire plan in Gaza touted two days of “highly productive” meetings in Cyprus, but the path forward remains unclear.

Officials have not yet set a timeline to bring in a Palestinian technocrat committee to take governance of the enclave from Hamas, and the international force that proposed security infrastructure is yet to materialize.

Israel has further entrenched its occupation of Gaza beyond the “yellow line” and continued to target Hamas members. Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he ordered the military to seize control of 70% of the enclave and suggested it could take even more.

Meanwhile, Hamas has regrouped, refused to give up its weapons and extended its control in the enclave.

The death toll is steadily mounting. At least 1,059 people have been killed and 3,429 injured in Gaza by Israeli attacks since the ceasefire deal was signed on October 11, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said on June 21.

One child has been killed in Gaza every day on average since October, according to a CNN tally of health ministry figures. In June an independent UN commission found that Israel was continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians by deliberately targeting children in the Gaza, an accusation Israel rejected as “a political blood libel disguised as a UN document.”

Those living in Gaza say diplomats’ references to “peace” do not reflect their reality – where the brutality of war has endured.

“You can be bombed anytime in any place,” said Sally Saleh, an aid worker displaced in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. “There is no actual ceasefire here.”

Rodents are biting sleeping children

More than 1.9 million people – nearly all of Gaza’s population – have been displaced, according to the UN, many multiple times. That number has remained stubbornly static, aggravating inhumane consequences of long-term homelessness.

Months into the truce, many people are staying in unventilated, improvised tents where rashes and other ectoparasitic infections – when parasites burrow into the skin – have increasingly been spreading, the UN warned at the end of May. In its most recent report, the UN said such infections had hit more than 80% of all displacement areas.

Rats, cockroaches and weasels run amok, tearing through limp tent sheets and biting children and newborn babies in their sleep. In some cases, they are “directly attacking people,” said Saleh, the head of emergency in Gaza for the UK-based NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). Elderly people and those with disabilities are less able to avoid rodents, especially at night.

“We have spoken to parents whose children have been bitten by rats, who are terrified that it will happen again,” Saleh said.

Elsewhere, residents have resorted to digging cesspits as latrine stocks run severely low, leading to soil and water contamination, according to Hosni Nadeem Mohanna, a water municipality spokesperson in Gaza City.

Rats are burrowing into aid parcels, forcing people to throw away scarce rice or flour supplies. Some Palestinians even try to hang food containers on the ceiling of their tents to keep them out of reach.

The Israeli government last month said it was launching a “large-scale pest control campaign” with the UN at a number of sites.

More broadly, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli agency tasked with facilitating aid distribution in Gaza, said it has coordinated the entry of approximately 600 trucks daily since last October – the minimum required under thee deal. “The humanitarian situation in Gaza is stable, supported by a continuous and consistent flow of aid,” COGAT posted on X earlier in June.

But human rights agencies say it is not enough, citing Israeli restrictions on the entry of power generations and spare parts and the killing of relief workers entrusted with distributing aid.

Those restrictions are forcing some agencies to cut back their operations, including water deliveries, “putting further strain on the population,” added Saleh.

Israel’s widening ‘yellow line’

The Israeli military’s recent expansion of the “yellow line” has been “driving fresh waves of displacement,” warned Saleh. Overhead, strikes and gunfire “across densely populated areas” have “intensified,” she said.

The Israeli military’s ongoing expansion of seized territory in Gaza, and the movement of the so-called “yellow line,” has been driving new displacement, warned Saleh. Overhead, strikes and gunfire on densely populated areas have “intensified,” she said.

Even when families do find a fresh patch of land, mounds of solid waste and sewage pools blight the environment, after Israel’s campaign rendered desalination plants, wastewater treatment and sewage management systems inoperable or inaccessible. That, combined with reams of uncleared rubble, create a hotbed for mosquitoes and rodents, according to Mohanna, the water municipality spokesperson.

In Gaza City alone, around 25 million tons of debris have accumulated, Mohanna said. Severe limits on the entry of waste compactors and rubble removal machinery curb authorities’ ability to efficiently collect waste, he told CNN. Some relief workers are using donkeys and bulldozers to remove solid waste, according to Louise Wateridge, a communications officer for the UN’s children’s agency in the Middle East and North Africa.

CNN has reached out to COGAT for comment.

“I wash my shoes every day because of the sewage,” said Saleh. “Gaza now is just a place where no creation can live.”

The most potent reminder of the bloodshed lies in the thousands of people buried under debris. Palestinian officials have recovered 784 bodies since the truce last October, the health ministry in Gaza said. However, at least 7,500 remain missing buried under the rubble, the Palestinian health ministry told CNN on June 28.

The longer a deceased person remains under the rubble, the less identifiable they become, Pat Griffiths, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Jerusalem, told CNN, adding that human remains “need to be treated with dignity.”

“There’s more of a risk that this circumstantial evidence might be lost,” he added, citing height, fingerprints, dental records, old injuries, scars and birthmarks – all identifying information that becomes more valuable in the absence of DNA testing kits in Gaza.

‘People continue to write, to speak and to hope’

With no sign of a definitive ceasefire in Gaza, a new generation of Palestinians say they are psychologically scarred from the horrors of the present – and paralyzed by the task of building the future.

Saleh said one of the most striking symptoms of children trying to process the death and loss in Gaza has presented when they are playing. “I have seen children simulate funerals or acts of burial,” she said.

Older students and professionals face an existential struggle to find a job, according to Yahya Alhamarna, a 24-year-old author displaced in Gaza City. As of May, the rate of unemployment in Gaza had gradually risen to 85.1%, according to the UN’s International Labor Organization. Before October, 2023, that figure stood at 45%, according to the PCBS.

“Palestinian men are often portrayed through a narrow security lens rather than as individuals living under extreme conditions. This framing is dehumanizing,” Alhamarna added.

As physical markers of life in Gaza are erased, Alhamarna has turned to storytelling as an “act of preserving memory,” citing Refaat Alareer, the famed professor who was killed in an Israeli strike in December 2023.

“He represented thought, culture, and the power of words,” Alhamarna said. “People continue to write, to speak and to hope. And that in itself is a form of resistance.”

CNN’s Eugenia Yosef contributed reporting.

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CNN’s Eugenia Yosef, Tal Shalev and Dana Karni contributed reporting.