Thousands of Gazans have gone missing. No one is accounting for them.
Palestinians inspect their homes after Israeli strikes hit the Al-Masry Tower on March 9 in Rafah. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)
JERUSALEM — A teenager who sold cigarettes. A singer on the rise. An engineer at a local bottling plant. They are among thousands who have been reported missing in Gaza.
by Miriam Berger and Hajar Harb
Many disappeared under the rubble after airstrikes. Others are believed to have been detained at Israeli checkpoints while fleeing south or trying to return to the north. Some simply left one day and never came back.
Their desperate families search hospitals and contact hotlines set up by International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). They scour photos of bodies in the streets and of blindfolded men detained by Israeli forces. They share pictures of relatives online, pleading for leads.
From October through February, the ICRC received reports of 5,118 Palestinians missing in Gaza. The Washington Post interviewed 15 people who lost contact with friends and family in Gaza since Oct. 7 — in only two cases were they able to find them. The most painful part, many said, was being in the dark about their fate.
“We hoped that we would succeed in getting even the most basic information,” said Ahmed Jalal, whose brother-in-law Mahmoud Abu Hani, a 25-year-old singer of traditional Arab music, disappeared Feb. 3 while trying to return home to Gaza City.
“Being lost is harder than him having been killed in the war or detained,” Jalal said. “When you are lost, no one knows anything.”
Mahmoud Abu Hani. (Family photo)
Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after the devastating Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, has killed more than 31,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians but says the majority of the dead are women and children. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) estimates it has killed between 11,500 and 13,000 militants, as it seeks to eradicate Hamas from the enclave.
The ministry relies mostly on reports from hospitals for its death counts. With the enclave’s medical system in shambles, Palestinian health officials say many more deaths have gone unrecorded. Roads are impassable, and communication networks are unreliable. Israel, meanwhile, will not disclose the identities of the hundreds of residents rights groups believe its forces have detained.
The IDF did not comment for this story, but has said previously that “suspects of terrorist activities” in Gaza are arrested and “brought to Israeli territory for further investigation.” Those found not to be involved in terrorist activity are sent back to Gaza, the military has said, and those who remain in detention are treated in accordance with Israeli law.
There has been no systematic effort to account for the missing. Last Friday, five months into the war, Gaza’s Health Ministry published a Google form to start collecting names of the dead and missing.
Under the rubble
In the initial weeks of Israel’s air campaign, the missing were mainly believed to be trapped, dead or alive, under rubble.
Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for the civil defense emergency services in Gaza, estimates that 8,000 bodies remain in the wreckage. During the first months of the war, rescue teams raced to strike sites when they could. But without proper equipment, he said, they were often left to dig people out by hand — or not at all.
Bassal says his teams in Gaza City rarely find full bodies now, instead uncovering partial remains — most decomposed and unidentifiable.
Habiba al-Kurd. (Family photo)
Ghada al-Kurd, 38, believes her brother, Safwat, his wife, Maysoon, and their 10-year-old daughter, Habiba, are among those lost in the ruins.
Kurd’s sister called Nov. 19 to say that a missile had struck the three-story house where their brother was staying in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. At first, neighbors said no one was home. Then they saw legs protruding from the rubble.
But without heavy equipment, Kurd said by phone from Rafah, rescuers “were unable to recover them, and they are still missing.” The family is not in the health ministry’s official list of the dead.
Ghada Isaa, who lives in the town of Salfit in the occupied West Bank, last heard from her sister, Wifa’a Alamoor, in Gaza City on Nov. 8. The 50-year-old had no immediate family left in the enclave, Issa said.
Israel’s military bombed Alamoor’s neighborhood near al-Shifa Hospital, saying it was targeting Hamas fighters in the area. Her landlord, who lives abroad, told Isaa the apartment next door was hit. Was her sister there?
“I don’t know,” said Isaa. “There was no one with her. No one to go look for her.”
“God willing, we will find her,” she said. “In the end we all die, but we must know her fate.”