November 10, 2025
Ahmed Ahmed and Ahmed Alsammak
Jouda’s daughter, 31-year-old Ola, told +972 Magazine that a local journalist, Ahmed Allouh — who would be killed three months later by an Israeli airstrike — saw the two men that morning, and later heard two tank shells being fired in the direction of the grove. Continued shelling in the area meant that he was unable to check on them.
By evening, neither Jouda nor Musleh had returned home and they were not answering their phones. Their families began to fear the worst.
When the shelling subsided the next morning, the two men’s relatives rushed to the grove. They found Musleh’s body, along with Jouda’s bicycle, phone, and personal belongings — but no second body.
Under renewed fire, the families fled. When they returned a month later, they found nothing. They tried once more during the ceasefire in March of this year, only to discover that the grove had been bulldozed by the Israeli army.
Jouda’s family contacted human rights groups, which in turn approached the Israeli military to determine whether he had been detained. His name did not appear on any such list.
Jouda is one of more than 11,000 Palestinians reported missing in Gaza, according to the UN — most of whom, it says, are women and children. These individuals may be trapped under the rubble, detained in Israeli prisons, or disappeared under other circumstances. Many of those in the first category are thought to be located in parts of the Strip that remain under Israeli military control, making it impossible to recover their bodies.
The Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared, a local initiative established earlier this year, is attempting to coordinate search efforts between human rights groups and the relevant authorities in Gaza. Ahmed Masoud, the organization’s director, explained that a research team is working with the families of the missing to gather as many details as possible about the circumstances of their disappearances, but their work is limited by the lack of available information and heavy equipment — both of which the Israeli authorities are refusing to provide.
Where remains have been recovered, a parallel crisis of identification has emerged. Gaza has no functioning labs for storing or analyzing DNA samples, while medical and dental records have been rendered largely inaccessible as a result of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has received over 13,500 tracing requests in Gaza since the war began, has worked with local authorities throughout the past two years to establish marked cemeteries for unidentified bodies — a necessary step to enable future identification. But in the present conditions, the organization is not able to set up a DNA testing lab.
The bodies Israel returned to Gaza last month as part of the ceasefire agreement have brought little clarity, as the army provided no names or other identifiers. Yahya Muhareb, an international law expert at Gaza’s Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, told +972 that this constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require the disclosure of the name of each returnee and the transfer of any personal belongings, as well as the cause, date, and location of their death.
Out of 285 bodies that Israel has returned since the start of the ceasefire, only 86 have been identified by their families. The rest were buried in a cemetery for the missing in Deir Al-Balah.
“Some of the corpses bore gunshot wounds to the back of the head and other parts of the body, indicating that they may have been killed in Israeli prisons and were subjected to fatal torture,” said Dr. Ahmed Dahir, director of the Forensic Medicine Department at Nasser Hospital.
Israel has previously disclosed names when returning Palestinian bodies. That it is not doing so now, Muhareb said, appears to mark an escalation in policy: “It’s psychological warfare.”
‘I stare at faces in the street, looking for my brothers’
Many of the missing are people who went to collect food and never returned — often from distribution sites managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), where Israeli soldiers and security contractors killed over 2,600 people since May. But even before the GHF, finding sufficient food during the war was a dangerous endeavor.
Shawqi Al-Helu, a 32-year-old father of four from Gaza City, disappeared on Oct. 29 last year after going to collect aid on Gaza’s coastal road near the Zikim Crossing. At the time, his family and the nine additional displaced people living with them were surviving on one meal per day.
“He despised going there, but he couldn’t stand watching his children crying and starving,” Al-Helu’s sister, Laila, told +972.
That day, the Israeli army opened fire on the crowd waiting for aid, killing at least six people. By nightfall, Al-Helu had not returned, and the family grew anxious. They searched hospital morgues and called anyone who might know what happened to him, but his body was nowhere to be found.
“Some people told us they had seen his body against a wall near the crossing; others said they had seen him alive in the south; and others claimed he was in prison,” Laila explained. “We contacted the ICRC and other human rights organisations, and they said the Israeli army had told them he was not detained. We are exhausted by rumours, and we don’t know where he is.”
When Al-Helu’s family fled their home a few months later, his wife, Aya, packed some of his clothes in the hope that they would be reunited. She was deeply disappointed to learn he was not among the Palestinians released in the recent prisoner exchange.
Tragically, Al-Helu’s disappearance means that Laila has lost two brothers as a result of the war: the first, Mohammed, was killed in December 2023, also while trying to buy food.
“Since the ceasefire went into effect, I have been staring at people’s faces in the street, looking for my two brothers,” she said. “The war is over, so why haven’t they come back?”
Mass graves for the unidentified
When a body is identified by relatives, the medical authorities release it for burial. If the remains cannot be identified, there is a distinct protocol: Forensic teams collect samples and store them in hospitals for up to 10 days before local authorities bury the body, explained Ahmed Obeid, director of the cemeteries department at Gaza’s Endowments and Religious Affairs Ministry.
But that process has become increasingly unfeasible. Last year, Israel transferred two truckloads of corpses to Gaza without any coordination or identifying information. With no capacity for identification, the bodies were buried in a mass grave — an incident Obeid described as a “major catastrophe.”
The collapse of formal systems has often forced civilians to take on the role of undertakers. During periods of intense bombing, when rescue teams could not reach bombarded neighborhoods, people buried the dead where they fell, without always knowing who they were.
Mohammad Imad, 35, was sheltering in Gaza City’s Tal Al-Hawa neighbourhood when the Israeli army bombed the area on Dec. 23, 2023. “Many buildings were hit,” he told +972. “We heard our neighbours screaming after their house was bombed at night, but we couldn’t help them, and the rescue crews couldn’t come — it was extremely dangerous.”
The next morning, Imad and another neighbour went to inspect one of the destroyed buildings. “More than 20 people had been killed,” he recounted. “I saw a man’s body without a head, then a head, and then other body parts. We were extremely scared and shocked.”
They dug a hole in the street and buried the remains, unable to identify any of the dead. “There were a lot of body parts, and we feared dogs would eat them,” he explained.
That night, another building nearby that housed dozens of people was bombed. “It was too risky to leave the house or rescue anyone,” Imad said. “We decided to move out the next day when it was a bit quieter, without burying [the newly deceased]. If we had stayed that night, we would have been killed.”
When he and his uncle returned, they found that the grave they had dug for the first victims had been disturbed by dogs, and some bodies had been eaten. They refilled the hole but fled as heavy bombardment resumed. Months later, a neighbour told him the bodies had been moved, but Imad still does not know when, how, or by whom.
“I am still haunted by nightmares,” Imad said. “I will never forget that day.”
Ahmed Ahmed and Ahmed Alsammak
Over 11,000 Palestinians, mostly
women and children, have disappeared since Oct. 7. Relatives don’t know if
they’re dead or alive, under rubble or in prison.
On the morning of Sept. 28 last
year, 67-year-old Abdulaziz Jouda and his friend Jabr Musleh set out to harvest
olives from a grove north of Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The area,
near the Netzarim Corridor occupied at the time by the Israeli army, had been
designated a red, or “danger,” zone, but the men were determined to gather the
season’s produce.
Jouda’s daughter, 31-year-old Ola, told +972 Magazine that a local journalist, Ahmed Allouh — who would be killed three months later by an Israeli airstrike — saw the two men that morning, and later heard two tank shells being fired in the direction of the grove. Continued shelling in the area meant that he was unable to check on them.
By evening, neither Jouda nor Musleh had returned home and they were not answering their phones. Their families began to fear the worst.
When the shelling subsided the next morning, the two men’s relatives rushed to the grove. They found Musleh’s body, along with Jouda’s bicycle, phone, and personal belongings — but no second body.
Under renewed fire, the families fled. When they returned a month later, they found nothing. They tried once more during the ceasefire in March of this year, only to discover that the grove had been bulldozed by the Israeli army.
Jouda’s family contacted human rights groups, which in turn approached the Israeli military to determine whether he had been detained. His name did not appear on any such list.
Jouda is one of more than 11,000 Palestinians reported missing in Gaza, according to the UN — most of whom, it says, are women and children. These individuals may be trapped under the rubble, detained in Israeli prisons, or disappeared under other circumstances. Many of those in the first category are thought to be located in parts of the Strip that remain under Israeli military control, making it impossible to recover their bodies.
The Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared, a local initiative established earlier this year, is attempting to coordinate search efforts between human rights groups and the relevant authorities in Gaza. Ahmed Masoud, the organization’s director, explained that a research team is working with the families of the missing to gather as many details as possible about the circumstances of their disappearances, but their work is limited by the lack of available information and heavy equipment — both of which the Israeli authorities are refusing to provide.
Where remains have been recovered, a parallel crisis of identification has emerged. Gaza has no functioning labs for storing or analyzing DNA samples, while medical and dental records have been rendered largely inaccessible as a result of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has received over 13,500 tracing requests in Gaza since the war began, has worked with local authorities throughout the past two years to establish marked cemeteries for unidentified bodies — a necessary step to enable future identification. But in the present conditions, the organization is not able to set up a DNA testing lab.
The bodies Israel returned to Gaza last month as part of the ceasefire agreement have brought little clarity, as the army provided no names or other identifiers. Yahya Muhareb, an international law expert at Gaza’s Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, told +972 that this constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require the disclosure of the name of each returnee and the transfer of any personal belongings, as well as the cause, date, and location of their death.
Out of 285 bodies that Israel has returned since the start of the ceasefire, only 86 have been identified by their families. The rest were buried in a cemetery for the missing in Deir Al-Balah.
“Some of the corpses bore gunshot wounds to the back of the head and other parts of the body, indicating that they may have been killed in Israeli prisons and were subjected to fatal torture,” said Dr. Ahmed Dahir, director of the Forensic Medicine Department at Nasser Hospital.
Israel has previously disclosed names when returning Palestinian bodies. That it is not doing so now, Muhareb said, appears to mark an escalation in policy: “It’s psychological warfare.”
‘I stare at faces in the street, looking for my brothers’
Many of the missing are people who went to collect food and never returned — often from distribution sites managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), where Israeli soldiers and security contractors killed over 2,600 people since May. But even before the GHF, finding sufficient food during the war was a dangerous endeavor.
Shawqi Al-Helu, a 32-year-old father of four from Gaza City, disappeared on Oct. 29 last year after going to collect aid on Gaza’s coastal road near the Zikim Crossing. At the time, his family and the nine additional displaced people living with them were surviving on one meal per day.
“He despised going there, but he couldn’t stand watching his children crying and starving,” Al-Helu’s sister, Laila, told +972.
That day, the Israeli army opened fire on the crowd waiting for aid, killing at least six people. By nightfall, Al-Helu had not returned, and the family grew anxious. They searched hospital morgues and called anyone who might know what happened to him, but his body was nowhere to be found.
“Some people told us they had seen his body against a wall near the crossing; others said they had seen him alive in the south; and others claimed he was in prison,” Laila explained. “We contacted the ICRC and other human rights organisations, and they said the Israeli army had told them he was not detained. We are exhausted by rumours, and we don’t know where he is.”
When Al-Helu’s family fled their home a few months later, his wife, Aya, packed some of his clothes in the hope that they would be reunited. She was deeply disappointed to learn he was not among the Palestinians released in the recent prisoner exchange.
Tragically, Al-Helu’s disappearance means that Laila has lost two brothers as a result of the war: the first, Mohammed, was killed in December 2023, also while trying to buy food.
“Since the ceasefire went into effect, I have been staring at people’s faces in the street, looking for my two brothers,” she said. “The war is over, so why haven’t they come back?”
Mass graves for the unidentified
When a body is identified by relatives, the medical authorities release it for burial. If the remains cannot be identified, there is a distinct protocol: Forensic teams collect samples and store them in hospitals for up to 10 days before local authorities bury the body, explained Ahmed Obeid, director of the cemeteries department at Gaza’s Endowments and Religious Affairs Ministry.
But that process has become increasingly unfeasible. Last year, Israel transferred two truckloads of corpses to Gaza without any coordination or identifying information. With no capacity for identification, the bodies were buried in a mass grave — an incident Obeid described as a “major catastrophe.”
The collapse of formal systems has often forced civilians to take on the role of undertakers. During periods of intense bombing, when rescue teams could not reach bombarded neighborhoods, people buried the dead where they fell, without always knowing who they were.
Mohammad Imad, 35, was sheltering in Gaza City’s Tal Al-Hawa neighbourhood when the Israeli army bombed the area on Dec. 23, 2023. “Many buildings were hit,” he told +972. “We heard our neighbours screaming after their house was bombed at night, but we couldn’t help them, and the rescue crews couldn’t come — it was extremely dangerous.”
The next morning, Imad and another neighbour went to inspect one of the destroyed buildings. “More than 20 people had been killed,” he recounted. “I saw a man’s body without a head, then a head, and then other body parts. We were extremely scared and shocked.”
They dug a hole in the street and buried the remains, unable to identify any of the dead. “There were a lot of body parts, and we feared dogs would eat them,” he explained.
That night, another building nearby that housed dozens of people was bombed. “It was too risky to leave the house or rescue anyone,” Imad said. “We decided to move out the next day when it was a bit quieter, without burying [the newly deceased]. If we had stayed that night, we would have been killed.”
When he and his uncle returned, they found that the grave they had dug for the first victims had been disturbed by dogs, and some bodies had been eaten. They refilled the hole but fled as heavy bombardment resumed. Months later, a neighbour told him the bodies had been moved, but Imad still does not know when, how, or by whom.
“I am still haunted by nightmares,” Imad said. “I will never forget that day.”
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