GENEVA: War-torn Gaza is heavily contaminated by unexploded ordnance, which frequently kills and maims people and could threaten recovery efforts far into the future, the UN said.
Unexploded ordnance, ranging from undetonated bombs or grenades to simple bullets, has become a common sight in the Gaza Strip since the start of Israel’s war in the Palestinian territory.
The UN Mine Action Service, UNMAS, said it had data suggesting that since the start of the conflict, more than 1,000 people had been killed in Gaza due to “indirect conflict,” from the remnants of war.
Julius Van der Walt, UNMAS chief in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, stressed that the number was certainly a severe under-estimate.
Speaking alongside him at a press conference on mine action work worldwide, Narmina Strishenets of Save the Children UK, also highlighted the heavy toll on youngsters.
A report by the organization published last year found that in 2024, the use of explosive weapons in Gaza left an average of 475 children each month with potentially lifelong disabilities, including amputations.
Today, Strishenets said, Gaza has “the largest cohort of child amputees” in the world.
Van der Walt said UNMAS had so far been unable to conduct an extensive survey of the full scope of the problem, but “the evidence already suggests a high density of explosive ordnance contamination across the Gaza Strip.”
So far, UNMAS has identified “more than 1,000 items of explosive ordnance” during missions conducted over the past 2.5 years.
Compared to Gaza’s small geographic size, that means there is about one piece of explosive ordnance “every 600 meters,” he pointed out.
And those are only the items that have been found.
“We have barely scratched the surface in understanding what the level of contamination is,” he acknowledged.
Adding to the danger was Gaza’s very high population density.
Prior to the conflict, Gaza was already one of the most densely populated places on Earth, with around 6,000 people per square kilometer, Van der Walt said, pointing out that the war had effectively halved the available space and doubled the density.
“Explosive weapons are being used all across the territories, including in densely-populated refugee camps,” he said, pointing to a recent case where explosive ordnance was found inside a tent where people had been living for several weeks.
At the same time, “humanitarian convoys risk detonation as they travel throughout the Gaza Strip, and early recovery efforts are essentially stalled before they can even begin,” he said.
Van der Walt pointed to an assessment indicating that, in a best-case scenario, it will cost around $541 million to address the explosive ordnance threat if all necessary permissions are granted and the required equipment is accessible.
He warned that the contamination, including within mountains of debris, was so vast and so varied that it was “very close to impossible to ... do a full assessment,” and that ordnance would likely remain a problem for decades to come.
He pointed to the World War II bombs that continue to be discovered during construction projects in Britain.
“We can anticipate something along those lines” in Gaza, he said.
