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In the Gaza Strip, loss extends beyond death. It encompasses disappearance without a trace, anxiety without end. Mothers wait for phone calls that never come. Fathers search hospitals without finding names or bodies. The missing have become an open wound where two years of non-stop bombardment, displacement, detention, and forced disappearance intersect, while families remain suspended between painful hope and endless waiting.
More than 11,000 people, mostly women and children, are estimated to have gone missing in Gaza since Israel launched its military campaign following Hamas’s October 2023 attacks. Without accurate official statistics, their fates remain unknown: whether they were killed in airstrikes and buried under rubble, detained by Israeli forces, or disappeared under other circumstances.
A ceasefire agreement that came into effect in October 2025 has reduced the number of Israeli attacks and the rate of killing in a campaign that a UN commission of inquiry and numerous international experts have deemed a genocide. Although Israel frequently violates the ceasefire, and hundreds have been killed, the tenuous calm of the past five months has created space for the families of the missing to double down on their search for answers.
Maysaa al-Najjar, a 37-year-old mother of six from Jabalia refugee camp in the north of Gaza, has endured suffering unlike any other since Israeli forces detained her husband Abdullah in October 2023. The family was displaced from their home during the initial days of the war, and when Abdullah tried to return to collect food, clothes, and other belongings, he was taken by the Israeli military. He remains in Israeli prison to this day.
With his father gone, full responsibility for the family fell on al-Najjar’s son Ihab, who had not yet turned 18. Ihab was finishing high school, eagerly awaiting graduation and to begin university. “He always told me: ‘I’ll make you proud, your son Ihab will be among the top students,’” his mother recalls.
After his father’s detention, the family had no income. For much of 2024, Israel severely restricted aid access to northern Gaza, where al-Najjar and her family were staying, causing extreme hunger and starvation. In October of that year, Israel declared a complete siege of Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun and launched a major military operation. Despite the dangerous conditions, Ihab was forced to go and search for food for the family. “Need forced him to go out. There was no choice,” al-Najjar says.
On 30 October 2024, he went out one more time to see if he could find anything. He never returned. “From the moment of the evening call to prayer, I felt a strange feeling, the feeling of a mother who has lost her child,” al-Najjar says.
“Whenever there are martyrs whose clothes resemble my son Ihab’s clothes, I go to identify the bodies.”
She tried calling him repeatedly. The phone rang without answer for four full days.
His uncles went to hospitals and tried to search the area where he had gone, but couldn’t enter due to dangerous conditions. The Red Cross and prisoner affairs institutions were notified, but after more than a year, there is no definitive answer.
“Whenever there are martyrs whose clothes resemble my son Ihab’s clothes, I go to identify the bodies,” al-Najjar says. “They open the morgue refrigerators for me, and I look at the corpses one by one, but I’ve never found Ihab.”
The mother lives in constant torment. “If they had brought me my son from the first moment as a martyr, I would have accepted God’s will,” she says. Instead, she is left with painful, gnawing questions: “Did dogs eat my son? Did a tank run him over? Did they detain him? Or did a building fall on him?”
Despite everything, al-Najjaral-Najjar clings to hope. “I want my heart to be at peace... I haven’t lost hope. As long as I haven’t seen my son’s body and haven’t said goodbye to him, I’ll keep searching for him.”
She recalls a moment that both increased her pain and ignited her hope: “Once they brought me a shoe they said was Ihab's, but it was size 37 and my son wears size 40.”
“My heart tells me he’s still alive,” she says. “I don’t want to accept that I’ve lost him forever. I want to know his fate, anything, just to reassure me.”
Conflicting accounts of a disappeared university student
Um Khaled al-Akhras, a 62-year-old from Rafah in southern Gaza, was forcibly displaced to Khan Younis after Israeli forces once again launched a major offensive in her city in March and April 2025. Among her five children, Ahmed Sobhi al-Akhras, 21, was closest to her heart.
Ahmed was a third-year Information Technology student. He dreamed of finishing university, working in his field, and starting his own company.
On the evening of 21 June 2025, Ahmed went to a food distribution site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation west of Khan Younis as Israeli siege and aid restrictions pushed the enclave toward famine. “He wanted to provide his elderly parents with some flour and canned goods,” his mother says.
Since that night, contact was cut off. “We kept calling his phone. It was ringing but no one answered,” al-Akhras continued. The next morning, at eight o’clock, even the ringing stopped.
“We ask released prisoners, they tell us: ‘We saw him.’ I don’t understand why they won’t acknowledge him. What is his fate?”
The family visited all hospitals without finding any trace. “If he were a martyr or injured, we should have found him,” the mother says.
Accounts conflicted. Some witnesses confirmed Israeli forces raided the location and detained seven young men, while others said the number reached 19. The family contacted three people released by the military around 11:30pm who said Ahmed was present and injured in his foot.
Al-Akhras contacted several human rights institutions concerned with prisoners and the missing, but she says she received the same response from all of them: “He is not detained by Israeli occupation forces.”
Despite this, she adds: “We ask released prisoners, they tell us: ‘We saw him.’” She asks with anguish: “I don’t understand why they won’t acknowledge him. What is his fate?”
“If he were a martyr, I would pray for his mercy every day. God knows how I wake up from sleep,” she says. “He was the youngest, my precious son. Ahmed was dutiful to his parents; their support during displacement and harsh life. When I lost him, it was as if life ceased to exist, the world became darkness.”
Al-Akhras concludes with a prayer: “Oh God, if he won’t return to me, take me instead, and don’t torture me more than this… A fire is burning in my chest.”
A disabled man vanishes from displacement camp
Maysoon Kaheel, 65, tells of her brother Maher Kaheel, 60, a person with disabilities who disappeared one week after Israeli forces invaded Rafah for the first time in May 2024.
The family was displaced during the first seven months of war, returned to Rafah, and then forced again to flee to Khan Younis. There, they stayed in a tent under conditions Kaheel describes as “very bad”.
Maher couldn’t bear tent life. His psychological condition deteriorated, and after a week in Khan Younis, he disappeared on 15 May 2024 around seven in the morning.
“We want to know his fate, just so our minds can rest.”
The family visited all hospitals, contacted the Red Cross and human rights institutions, and posted his photo on social media. Even during the ceasefire between January and March 2025, the search continued without result.
“The situation is very sad and harsh, especially since he’s sick,” Kaheel says. “We want to know his fate, just so our minds can rest.”
She pauses, then continues: “If he had died, it would have been much easier than this. I can’t describe my feelings.”
After a long sigh, she adds: “I swear we searched for him a lot... I wish we could find him."
“It’s very difficult to live when I can’t get past [the fact] that we lost him, and we don’t know where he went or what happened to him.”
Legal framework and systematic failures
Alaa al-Iskafi, director of Al-Dameer Human Rights Foundation, explains that the International Committee of the Red Cross defines a missing person as anyone “whose fate is unknown as a result of armed conflict, internal violence, or natural disasters, and whose location or fate is unknown, whether alive, detained, or deceased”.
Al-Iskafi says the primary responsibility for rising numbers of missing persons in Gaza lies with the occupying Israeli military, which has failed to disclose locations of missing or detained persons, concealed the fate of detainees, and failed to specify locations of remains and bodies.
According to a January 2026 report by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, as of September last year, more than 2,900 Palestinians from Gaza were being held in Israeli prisons that the group describes as “camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as policy”. Some of these prisoners were released after the ceasefire agreement came into effect in October 2025.
International humanitarian law obligates Israel as an occupying power to provide all information related to the missing and, where there are remains or bodies, to return these to the families and disclose their numbers and identities clearly.
Available legal mechanisms include the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, which has expressed alarm about reports of Israel’s enforced disappearance of Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli military’s refusal to provide information about cases. The UN’s Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance also created a Committee on Enforced Disappearances, but Israel has not signed the treaty.
Al-Iskafi says that families of the missing live with constant anxiety due to the lack of knowledge about the fate of their loved ones, amid the absence of a unified, comprehensive mechanism to document all cases of missing and forcibly disappeared persons in Gaza.
He emphasises the necessity of establishing a genetic database to collect DNA samples from families and match them with bodies and remains found or recovered.
Al-Iskafi called for the international community to exert real pressure on Israel – the occupying state – through international and judicial mechanisms to force it to provide official lists of names of missing and forcibly disappeared persons and disclose their fate.
This story was published in collaboration with Egab. Edited by Lina El Wardani and Eric Reidy.
