Israeli Air Strikes Leave Thousands Missing In Gaza, Families Search For Bodies

In Gaza, the brutal Israeli offensive has left families trapped in suspended grief as “more than 72,700 Palestinians” have been killed and “hundreds remain missing” with no bodies to bury, no graves to visit, and no chance to say goodbye.

“Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – Beside an unmarked grave, Lina al-Assi sits quietly picking flowers and pouring water over the soil, believing it to be her husband’s resting place”

Al Jazeera

TRT World follows the stories of Sabreen Baraka, Areej Saleh, and Mohammad Kamal from Khan Younis, where Sabreen says her son Ihab disappeared during an Israeli air strike on October 14, 2023 in the “yellow line,” and since then there has been “no body, no funeral, no grave.”

Al Jazeera

Sabreen describes searching through hospitals and medical centres where remains recovered from bombed areas were being taken, but she says the recovered remains were only “bones, skulls, and mutilated body parts.”

She contrasts that with her other son Mohammed, killed in an Israeli attack in December 2023, when the family was able to recover his body, pray over it, and bury him, saying “That gesture — seeing the body, praying over it, knowing where he rests — made all the difference in how we carried the pain.”

In Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip, Lina al-Assi visits a cemetery known as the “cemetery of the missing,” where she believes an unmarked grave holds her husband Jihad Tafesh, who went missing on October 8, 2023, the second day of the war.

Al Jazeera says Lina is one of about 1,200 people whose unidentified bodies and missing persons could not be identified are buried there, and she told the broadcaster that “We contacted the Red Cross to check his fate, but with no result.”

Al-Jazeera Net

Ziad Obaid, head of the cemeteries department at Gaza’s Ministry of Religious Endowments, said Deir el-Balah was established in October 2025 because most cemeteries in Gaza City and northern Gaza were closed or in areas difficult to access.

Obaid said the “main challenge is not only the number of bodies, but their condition,” noting that many arrive “severely decomposed or disfigured,” and he added that even when Israel sends DNA reference codes, they are largely unusable in Gaza due to the absence of functioning laboratories.

Al Jazeera also reports that bodies are transferred from the Red Cross to Gaza’s main hospitals, where forensic teams photograph the bodies, collect samples, and assign unique codes by the Ministry of Health or the Ministry of Religious Endowments.

Noon Post describes a “Missing Persons File” in which the fate of thousands of Gazan residents who disappeared during what it calls a genocidal war remains unknown, with the Palestinian Ministry of Justice saying in its latest statement dated April 22, 2026 that the war has left “more than 11,200 Palestinians listed as missing or forcibly disappeared since October 7, 2023.”

The same source says the number includes “more than 4,700 women and children,” and it adds that the ministry notes “thousands of martyrs whose bodies remain under the rubble of destroyed buildings” in Gaza, alongside unknown numbers of detainees in occupation prisons without acknowledgment of their presence.

In the Al-Aqad family case in the al-Mawasi area west of Khan Younis, Al Jazeera correspondent Rami Taima explains that an image circulated and published a few days earlier showed an Israeli soldier with a Palestinian woman and her daughter blindfolded inside a military vehicle, which the family confirmed involved members who disappeared since the area was overrun in December 2023.

The Al-Aqad family says it has no decisive official narrative about what happened, and one relative insists, “God willing, they are alive,” while Alaa Skaffi of the Al-Damir Center for Human Rights says formal requests were submitted to the Israeli side “but no response has been received yet.”

The stakes extend beyond identification, as Noon Post says enforced disappearance creates “humanitarian and legal” consequences, including that women may live in a suspended legal status affecting inheritance, marriage, and family status without official confirmation of death or life.