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Missing in Gaza
L'Orient Today describes Gaza as engulfed in violence and says that for thousands of people, including Farouk and Faysal, life has become “a constant story of survival, a desperate race against hunger.”
“For thousands of people in Gaza, like Farouk and Faysal, life is a constant story of survival, a desperate race against hunger”
On Friday, April 18, 2025, the two brothers, aged 25 and 21 respectively, went searching for food around the abandoned houses of the Shuja'iyya neighborhood of eastern Gaza City, after their older brother had already been killed.
Their mother, Um Firas, told L'Orient Today on June 22 via WhatsApp that “when they heard their little brother Fahed and their sisters Fayza and Fajr crying out of hunger, they decided to take a risk without telling me.”
The article also says the “cease-fire” that had taken effect between Israel and Hamas on Jan. 19, 2025, was shattered a mere three months later, and it frames Shuja'iyya as one of the areas affected by the renewed fighting.
Numbers of the Missing
Télérama reports that “Officially, eleven thousand two hundred people remain missing in Gaza since the start of the ceasefire in October 2025.”
It says the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip went into effect on October 10, 2025, and that it “remains fragile,” while Palestinian Civil Defense search operations began in late November.
The outlet describes families waiting for answers through the list of prisoners, released in dribs and drabs, and it highlights Majida, who has had “no news for two years about her son, Ahmed, 19.”
Télérama also recounts Ibrahim returning every day for a year to the rubble of his house, where his wife and four children, aged 11, 10, 5, and 4 months, were buried, and it says the arrival of additional excavators will help him recover their remains.
Search, Prisoner Lists, and Hope
Télérama says Arte Reportage broadcasts footage from a team of journalists who “bear witness to the scale of the humanitarian disaster,” and it describes the images as “harrowing.”
“For thousands of people in Gaza, like Farouk and Faysal, life is a constant story of survival, a desperate race against hunger”
It links the search for the missing to the work of the Palestinian Civil Defense, stating that since late November the organization has launched search operations in Gaza.
For families, Télérama says hope lies in the list of prisoners, released in dribs and drabs, and it presents that release pattern as the only path to news when remains cannot yet be recovered.
In L'Orient Today’s account, the violence that shattered the Jan. 19, 2025 cease-fire is set against the ongoing uncertainty faced by families like Um Firas’s, whose sons went searching for food amid abandoned houses in Shuja'iyya.
