“Hitler Methods” Claim: Israel Accused of Using Aerosol Bombs

Israel’s Gaza campaign has produced a category of civilian loss that defies conventional accounting. An Al Jazeera Arabic investigation, “The Rest of the Story”, documents 2,842 Palestinians who left no identifiable remains after Israeli strikes since October 2023.

The findings link these disappearances to high-temperature and thermobaric munitions, many of them U.S.-manufactured, used repeatedly in dense urban settings.

Counting the Unrecoverable

Gaza’s Civil Defence has treated the absence of bodies as a forensic problem rather than an estimate. Spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told Al Jazeera that teams cross-reference household registries with remains recovered at strike sites. “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,” he said.

Those traces include blood spray on walls or fragments such as scalps. The tally of 2,842 covers incidents from October 2023 through 2024 and is based on site-by-site documentation rather than sampling.

“They Just Vanished”

Individual accounts anchor the data. Yasmin Mahani described returning at dawn on August 10, 2024, to al-Tabin school in Gaza City after an Israeli strike. “We found nothing of Saad. Not even a body to bury,” she said of her son.

Rafiq Badran, who lost four children in Bureij refugee camp, offered a similar account: “Four of my children just evaporated.”

Such testimony aligns with Civil Defence methods that classify victims only after hospitals and morgues yield no remains.

Weapons and Extreme Heat

The investigation attributes the phenomenon to weapons that combine blast pressure with extreme temperatures. Russian military expert Vasily Fatigarov explained that thermobaric munitions disperse an aerosolized fuel cloud before ignition, creating a fireball and vacuum effect.

“To prolong the burning time, powders of aluminium, magnesium and titanium are added,” he said, raising temperatures to 2,500C to 3,000C.

Gaza health officials cited even higher temperatures, up to 3,500C, in enclosed spaces.

Named systems include the 900 kg MK-84 unguided bomb packed with tritonal, a TNT-aluminum mix used in U.S.-made munitions; the BLU-109 bunker buster with a delayed fuse and PBXN-109 explosive; and the GBU-39 small-diameter glide bomb using AFX-757. Fatigarov said of the GBU-39, “It is designed to keep the building structure relatively intact while destroying everything inside.”

Civil Defence teams reported finding fragments of GBU-39 wings at sites where bodies were absent.

Dr. Munir al-Bursh, director general of Gaza’s Health Ministry, described the biological mechanism.

When a body is exposed to energy exceeding 3,000 degrees combined with massive pressure and oxidation, the fluids boil instantly, the tissues vaporise and turn to ash.

Director General of Gaza’s Health Ministry Dr. Munir al-Bursh

Supply Chain and Accountability

The investigation situates these effects within an ongoing weapons pipeline. On January 25, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump instructed the Pentagon to release a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, overturning a hold imposed during President Joe Biden’s term. Axios reported that 1,800 MK-84 bombs stored in the United States are set for sea delivery in the coming days.

On March 1, 2025, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of nearly 45,000 bombs, including more than 35,500 MK-84 and BLU-117 munitions, 4,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads, and 5,000 Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kits, with deliveries beginning in 2026 and 2028.

The package also includes $295 million in Caterpillar D9 bulldozers, with deliveries expected from 2027.

Legal experts interviewed by Al Jazeera argued that weapons unable to distinguish between combatants and civilians raise issues beyond the battlefield. Diana Buttu said, “This is a global genocide, not just an Israeli one,” pointing to continued transfers despite International Court of Justice provisional measures in January 2024 and an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued in November 2024 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

International Law Under Strain

Professor Tariq Shandab said the persistence of strikes after those legal steps shows the limits of enforcement. He noted that more than 600 Palestinians were killed after an October ceasefire agreement and cited siege conditions restricting food and medicine as separate violations.

Shandab highlighted U.S. veto power at the UN Security Council while noting that universal jurisdiction cases in Germany and France remain legally available if pursued.