On November 1, 2024, at dusk, an Israeli quadcopter came over Jabalya in the north of the Gaza Strip. Earlier that day Mohammad Yousef Shalayel had visited his parents’ house, where 16 displaced relatives were sheltering. He then went back with his wife and children to his in-laws’ home. That was the last time he saw his family. He described what followed as an “enormous explosion”. When he returned the next morning, he told CNN, “all four floors had fallen on top of one another, on the people who were inside.”
Inside were his elderly mother, his two brothers, his sister, and their children and in-laws.
I will never forget… I found dismembered remains of children and women. I broke down, but I tried to hold myself together so that I could gather the pieces of flesh that were scattered around.
Nearly two years later he still cannot go back. The Israeli military now occupies more than half of the ruined territory, and his family’s street lies inside it. He says almost all of his relatives are still unaccounted for.
Counting the dead who cannot be found
Three years have passed since Hamas and other militant groups killed around 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023. A year has passed since a US-brokered ceasefire was supposed to end the war that followed. Israeli strikes still come almost every day. The Palestinian Ministry of Health puts the number killed in the enclave at more than 74,000. That number may still rise a great deal, because a war’s death toll only includes the bodies someone has found.
Gaza’s Civil Defense says some 8,000 people are missing, most of them probably buried under the rubble. The UN has estimated that rubble at 61 million tonnes. The UN Development Programme has said that clearing most of it is possible in seven years, but only under the right conditions.
Time works against the families. Pat Griffiths, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Jerusalem, said that each passing day lowers the chance of identifying the dead as “crucial evidence” is lost. Under international humanitarian law, he said, the parties to a conflict “have an obligation to conduct search and recovery work”. They must also collect, preserve and hand over what they learn to the other side.
The line
Under the October 2025 ceasefire plan, Israeli forces were to pull back to the “yellow line”, which marked the areas they occupied. Residents and aid workers say the line keeps moving, and it shuts Palestinians out of wide stretches of ground where their relatives may be buried. Several people in Jabalya said they had seen the military demolishing mosques, homes and other buildings near the line, or clearing rubble there.
“Where are the bones of our loved ones?” asked one resident, Yahya Odeh. “Where are their bodies? There are entire families beyond the yellow line who have been separated from their relatives.”
In a statement on September 15, the UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, warned that areas under Israeli military control were being levelled “by bulldozers with no respect for the dead”. His warning came after Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, an NGO based in Geneva, reported that such clearing could erase evidence of war crimes. Türk said that remains of “what appears to be entire families” were being dug out in areas Palestinians can reach, and that these finds might be only “the tip of the iceberg.” He called for the evidence to be preserved and for international investigators to be allowed into all of Gaza.
Above the rubble, the politics have stalled. In August, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a 15-point plan for long-term stability in Gaza and said Israeli forces would not withdraw “until Hamas is genuinely disarmed.” Hamas demanded that Israel stop its strikes and pull back to the yellow line, as the ceasefire plan requires. Last year an independent UN inquiry found that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. The Israeli government rejects that finding.
Two excavators
In the parts of Gaza that Palestinians can reach, Civil Defense crews search through bombed-out homes. Their spokesperson, Mahmoud Basal, said they have recovered around 1,000 bodies since last October. The UN rights office, citing the Civil Defence, gave a lower figure in September: more than 630 bodies and remains recovered between November 2025 and September 2026. Gaza City has one excavator, Basal said, and central Gaza has one more. Palestinian officials have asked for 10 excavators, 10 bulldozers and 30 trucks. With those, he said, the work could be “completed”.
COGAT, the Israeli agency that oversees aid entering Gaza, says it has let in “essential equipment” such as engine oil, medical supplies and tents. According to Reuters, it also said heavy machinery and reconstruction materials would be held back until Hamas disarms. A government can decide whether the dead are dug out by machine or by hand, and here it has decided they will be dug out by hand.
Unexploded ordnance makes the work dangerous, Griffiths said. Many rescuers are “literally scraping away, a few centimeters at a time.” Basal said some of the bodies they find show signs of having been eaten by rodents or stray dogs. Shalayel described how his brother’s arm stuck out from the rubble of their parents’ house, and how he wrapped it in a blanket to protect it from an “enormous number” of roaming dogs. “It was a horrific sight,” he said.
“In the end, the family tries to comfort itself by believing that all of its relatives have been recovered from beneath the rubble,” Basal said. “But we cannot state (that) with certainty.”
Graves without names
Dr. Ahmad Dheir says he is one of only three specialist forensic doctors left in the enclave. Even before the war there was no DNA testing in Gaza, he said, because the years-long blockade by Israel and Egypt limited medical supplies. Griffiths said repeated Israeli strikes on health centres have left medical staff even more dependent on basic identification methods. Hospitals lack freezers, fuel runs short and the power keeps failing, so samples decay, Dheir said. Staff rely on blood typing and laboratory tests that often give no firm answer.
Suha al-Sharif is 55. Her son Jihad, 33, was supposed to look after her in old age. He was shot and killed on November 9, 2023, while the family was being displaced from Gaza City. His body was taken to Al-Shifa Hospital, but the attacks there grew so heavy that staff could not bury anyone. The family had to flee south again. She has not been able to find him.
“The hardest thing is that I couldn’t bury him; I don’t know where his body is,” she said. “At night, when I put my head on my pillow, memories come back. There is nothing left to cry for. My life feels over.”
Two aid workers said families of the missing show signs of “ambiguous loss”, a condition in which people feel lost, anxious, depressed or guilty and find it hard to concentrate. Israa Alqahwaji, who coordinates mental health work in Gaza for Medical Aid for Palestinians, said wanting to find a body “reflects a very deep human need for truth.” “Continuing to live does not mean abandoning or forgetting the person they have lost,” she said.
In Deir al-Balah there is a burial ground that local people call the cemetery of the missing. According to the Civil Defense, about 1,000 unidentified people are buried there. Each grave has a serial number in a digital system that the authorities are building with international aid agencies. If DNA testing ever becomes available, families may be able to find their relatives through it.
“We believe these people and their families have a right, as a matter of human dignity, to find their loved ones,” Dheir said.