An Al Jazeera investigation has found that thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have vanished without trace after Israeli strikes using extreme heat munitions supplied by the U.S.
At dawn on August 10, 2024, Yasmin Mahani made her way through the smouldering remains of Al-Tabi’in school in Gaza City, looking for her son, Saad. She came across her husband in screaming, but Saad was nowhere to be found.
Mahani said she entered the mosque and realised she was walking over flesh and blood, speaking to Al Jazeera Arabic for an investigation that aired on Monday. She spent days moving between hospitals and morgues. She said they found nothing of Saad and did not even have a body to bury, describing that as the hardest part.
Mahani’s loss reflects a wider pattern documented during Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 72,000 people. Civil Defence teams say 2,842 Palestinians have “evaporated” since October 2023, leaving only blood spray or small fragments of flesh where bodies once were.
Counting the missing
The figure of 2,842 is not presented as an estimate but as the result of what officials describe as methodical field work. Gaza’s Civil Defence says it relies on site inspections and family testimony to determine who is missing.
Spokesperson Mahmoud Basal elaborated that teams use a “method of elimination” at strike sites. “We enter a targeted home and cross-reference the known number of occupants with the bodies recovered,” he said.
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“If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we treat the remaining two as ‘evaporated’ only after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces-blood spray on walls or small fragments like scalps,” Basal added.
How the weapons work
Experts interviewed in the investigation linked the disappearances to thermal and thermobaric weapons capable of generating temperatures exceeding 3,500 degrees Celsius. These munitions disperse fuel before ignition, producing an intense fireball and pressure wave.
Vasily Fatigarov, a Russian military expert, said thermobaric weapons obliterate matter rather than just kill. “To prolong the burning time, powders of aluminium, magnesium and titanium are added to the chemical mixture,” Fatigarov said. “This raises the temperature of the explosion to between 2,500 and 3,000 degrees Celsius [4,532F to 5,432F].”
Dr Munir al Bursh, director general of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, outlined the impact of such temperatures on the human body. He noted that the boiling point of water is 100 degrees Celsius [212F]. He explained that when a body is subjected to energy above 3,000 degrees along with intense pressure and oxidation, its fluids boil at once, the tissues vaporise and reduce to ash, which he described as chemically inevitable.
Weapons identified
The investigation identified several U.S. manufactured bombs allegedly used in Gaza, including the MK-84, the BLU-109 bunker buster and the GBU-39 precision glide bomb.
The MK-84 is a 900kg unguided bomb loaded with tritonal that can produce temperatures reaching 3,500C [6,332F].
The BLU-109 was deployed in a September 2024 strike on al Mawasi and is reported to have caused the evaporation of 22 people after exploding within an area Israel had designated as a safe zone.
The GBU-39 was used in the al Tabi’in school attack, according to the investigation. “The GBU-39 is designed to keep the building structure relatively intact while destroying everything inside,” Fatigarov stated. “It kills via a pressure wave that ruptures lungs and a thermal wave that incinerates soft tissue.” Civil Defence crews said they found fragments of GBU-39 wings at sites where bodies had vanished.
Questions of responsibility
Legal experts argue that responsibility extends beyond Israel to countries supplying the weapons. Diana Buttu, a lecturer at Georgetown University in Qatar, described the situation in stark terms.
“This is a global genocide, not just an Israeli one,” Buttu said. Speaking at the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha, she added, “We see a continuous flow of these weapons from the United States and Europe. They know these weapons do not distinguish between a fighter and a child, yet they continue to send them.”
Buttu said that under international law, the use of weapons that cannot distinguish between combatants and non-combatants constitutes a war crime. “The world knows Israel possesses and uses these prohibited weapons,” Buttu said. “The question is why are they allowed to remain outside the system of accountability.”
