More than 11,000 people, mostly women and children, are estimated to have gone missing in Gaza since Israel launched its military campaign following Hamas's October 2023 attacks. Some disappeared under collapsed buildings. Others vanished at military checkpoints. Still others simply walked away one day and never returned, their whereabouts unknown to families who search hospitals, morgues, and mass graves in search of answers that may never come.
One of the thousands is a teenager with autism who went out on a bike ride. Hassan took that ride hoping to escape, if only briefly, the suffocating chaos of displacement and bombardment. He never came home. His family has no way to know if he is buried under rubble, held in an Israeli detention facility, or dead. The uncertainty itself is a form of torture.
Rights groups say Israel is "disappearing" hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza, detaining them without charges or trial, often incommunicado. Under a wartime revision to Israeli law, detainees from Gaza can be held without any judicial review for 75 days and denied lawyers for even longer. The Israeli government does not publicly disclose how many people it holds from Gaza; numbers must be extracted through freedom of information requests. Families are left to guess, to hope, and to suffer.
The scale of the problem defies easy comprehension. The ICRC has its own separate list of missing; at least 7,000 cases still unresolved, not including those believed to be under rubble. The Gaza Health Ministry received reports from families of some 3,600 others missing, and so far, it has only investigated over 200 cases. Even these conservative estimates almost certainly undercount the true number, since entire families killed in single airstrikes leave no one behind to report the missing.
What makes finding the missing almost impossible is a cruel technological reality. The lack of DNA testing capabilities in Gaza significantly hampers identification efforts, with Israel having long restricted the entry of DNA testing equipment into the Strip. The most challenging cases involve partial remains: a skull, leg bones or fragments of a ribcage. These are carefully numbered and catalogued, but without DNA testing, definitive identification is often impossible.
When Israel does return bodies to Gaza, they arrive without names. Israel handed over the bodies through the Red Cross without names, only marked with numbered codes. The bodies were examined by forensic medicine to determine build, height, injuries, wounds, and cause of death if possible, and to check for bullet traces or other evidence. In some cases, entire truckloads of corpses have been transferred with no coordination or identifying information, forcing local authorities to bury unidentified remains in mass graves marked only by numbers.
This type of loss is known by psychologists as "ambiguous loss" and is considered the most stressful type. Families are being denied closure; will continue to hope that the missing person will return. Coping and grieving, processes which are essential for emotional recovery, are put on hold.
Hassan's case embodies a larger tragedy. His mother, if she is like the thousands of other parents searching, is probably still checking hospitals. She is probably still holding onto the fading possibility that somewhere, someone saw her son and might offer a clue. Israel has restricted DNA-testing supplies from entering Gaza. It is the state's responsibility to find missing persons, in this case, Israel, as the occupying power. So it would depend on the political will of the Israeli authorities to want to do something about it.
For families like Hassan's, the uncertainty never ends. No burial ceremony. No closure. No way to know if their son or daughter is alive, detained, or lying beneath numbered graves in an unmarked cemetery. The missing of Gaza remain suspended between hope and despair, their fates locked away in a system designed to conceal rather than reveal the truth.