Why couldn the rebel fleet use tractor beams to move the debris somewhere safe?
It’s a matter of inertia and energy. The trouble with any attempt by the rebels to do something about the explosion is that the combined mass of the rebel fleet is equal to only a tiny speck of the Death Star’s surface. If they used tractor beams on the station’s wreckage the result would be for the ships to be dragged by the debris while the debris would be only slightly deflected. The difficulty and amount of energy involved in containing or shifting the stuff of a moon-sized explosion is the same or greater than for moving the intact battle station around. If the rebels had been physically able to do something about the Death Star II explosion, they also would have had the capability to knock the station around the Endor system like a billiard ball. They plainly weren’t able to do that. Besides, the debris cloud was close enough to reach the forest moon within minutes or seconds, so the rebels had little time for large celestial manipulations.
