Thousands of people in Gaza have no idea what happened to their loved ones [Getty]
Thousands of families are anxiously waiting for the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip to take effect in order to learn the fate of their loved ones.
Most of them know nothing about what happened to their loved ones, who went missing during Israel’s horrific attacks and near-daily massacres in the Gaza Strip over the past 15 months.
Ever since the war on Gaza started following Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, around 11,200 people have gone missing according to the Gaza government media office.
They did not arrive at Gaza’s hospitals and they were not buried and are therefore not counted in the Gaza government’s official death toll, which now stands at 46,899.
Other estimates put the number of missing even higher.
It is believed that most of the missing are buried under the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings.
They haven’t been extracted for a number of reasons, among them the sheer density of the rubble, the lack of resources needed to search for and extract bodies, and the Israeli army’s prevention of the work of civil defence teams in many areas.
Many international organisations, including the UN and the ICRC have been calling for speedy action to find out the fate of the missing.
Israel has been preventing this in a number of ways, including by repeatedly targeting civil defence and ambulance crews and stopping the entry of fuel and equipment into the Gaza Strip.
Most of those missing are believed to be dead. Salah Abdul Ati, the head of the International Commission for the Support of the Rights of the Palestinian People, said that entire families had been wiped out in airstrikes, with residential blocks completely destroyed.
He estimated the number of those missing at over 15,000.
Many people are planning to return to destroyed areas if and when the ceasefire takes effect to look for their loved ones.
Ahmed Jaballah, a resident of the heavily bombed Jabalia refugee camp in the north of Gaza, lost contact with his 54-year-old sister Sawsan following an Israeli bombing on 11 May.
He said that he wanted to leave the camp after Israel order residents to evacuate and announced its intention to carry out a ground attack, but Sawsan refused.
“My sister insisted on staying in her home despite me trying to convince her to leave for the sake of her life, especially because she suffers from several chronic illnesses including obesity and high blood pressure,” he told The New Arab’s Arabic-language sister site Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
“After all my attempts failed, I was forced to leave without taking her. I continued talking to her through phone messages for four days after we fled, but after this all communication with her stopped. This made me very worried because the occupation would carry out massacres every day against civilians.”
Ahmed says that he has not known anything of the fate of his sister for eight months, and doesn’t know whether she is alive or dead, although he has assumed for months that she has been killed.
“We want to bury her if she is a martyr,” he added.
