UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher said there is an urgent need for more bulldozers and heavy machinery to enter the Gaza Strip to help recover the bodies of martyrs trapped under the rubble and to begin rebuilding the devastated area.

Fletcher warned that the scale of the tasks required to retrieve bodies from beneath the destruction in Gaza is “enormous and beyond the capacity of any single entity.” He emphasized that thousands of destroyed buildings and homes conceal beneath them the remains of entire families still waiting to be recovered.

He added that the massive amount of debris makes it extremely difficult to reach the victims without significant engineering and technical intervention.