In Gaza, there is still no trace of more than 13 thousand people. The number of dead is constantly increasing. Many of them may still be buried under the rubble, but many human rights groups say many others are likely to be disappeared.
Ahmed Abu Duke has been searching for his brother Mustafa for months. The family, refugees from the war, now takes shelter in the front yard of Nasser Hospital, south of Khan Yunis.
However, when they learned their house was burnt down nearby, Mustafa went there to discover its condition. He never came back after that. We have searched as much as we can, Ahmed said of what was once their home now a charred pile of rubble. The whole neighborhood has been bulldozed and many tall buildings have been razed to the ground.
The family searched for Mustafa, a retired ambulance driver, in nearby mass graves and bodies recovered from the rubble by Hamas-controlled civil defense teams, but he was nowhere to be found. We still hope that we will find him in one of the ambulances that are constantly coming to the hospital, Ahmed said.
In Hamas-controlled Gaza, the health ministry puts the death toll in the fighting so far at more than 35,000, but the number is based only on hospital casualties. There are many families like Mustafa’s who don’t know where their loved ones who have been missing for the past seven months are, how are they doing?
More than 10,000 people are trapped under these destroyed buildings, says the Palestinian Authority’s security agency, the Gaza Civil Defense.
According to the UN, the amount of debris accumulated throughout the Gaza Strip will amount to about 37 million tons, with bodies buried under it and about 7,500 tons of unexploded ordnance, another serious threat to volunteers and aid workers.
To retrieve bodies buried under the rubble, Civil Defense says it is working with its staff and volunteers but they have very basic equipment that often makes it difficult to reach the bodies of the dead.
Abdur Rahman Yaghi faced a tough challenge in retrieving the body of his buried relative. There is also the fear that if the body is not covered and left to rot, then the health system may seriously deteriorate when the heat rises further ahead.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), leaving their families in the dark, which it describes as disappeared, may have detained those who cannot be traced, the Amnesty International believes.
According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the IDF detained hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza without informing their families. However, the Geneva Convention, to which Israel is also a signatory, says that if a country detains a civilian it must disclose his identity and where he is being held.
Israeli authorities have canceled all visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to their detention centers, since the October 7 attacks. We have repeatedly asked for access to the places where the Palestinians are being held, but we have not yet been granted that permission, says Hisham Muhana, who works for the Red Cross in Gaza.
In Al Juwayda, another town in central Gaza, another family is searching for their missing child. They fear their child may have been missed as well.
Holding a photo of her son, Muhammad Ali’s mother searched until someone told her that IDF had taken away her son. He was last seen alive; they say, however, they do not know what happened to him after that.
Salwa Al-Masri, a Palestinian refugee woman says we want implementation of the decisions of the international community to halt the suffering and death toll in Gaza.
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