DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (news agencies) — The corpses keep coming every day, sometimes dozens at a time, brought to morgues in the Gaza Strip after being pried from under 15 months of rubble and pulled from battle zones long too dangerous for search-and-rescue teams to reach.
These bodies, dug up as a ceasefire took hold this week, are Gaza’s “missing,” the uncounted dead haunting families scattered by the war. For the Gaza Health Ministry, they were reduced to a bullet-point caveat beneath every daily death toll: “A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the streets, and cannot be accessed.”
On Sunday, as a deal between Israel and Hamas paused the deadliest war in a century of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, families across the enclave scrambled to reunite with their loved ones — the living, the dead and the missing.
Palestinians crowded the ruins that were once their homes, watching anxiously as civil defense teams hacked at the rubble in search of missing bodies. Each day of the ceasefire, the ministry has logged 50 to 120 recovered corpses.
“From the moment the truce began, we were searching and searching,” said Samira Alshaar, 58, who returned Sunday to the house she fled nine months earlier when the southern city of Rafah came under attack. She watched as her son, Ibrahim Qeshta, was killed by an airstrike before he could escape with her.
“We left our son behind,” she said.
Ibrahim’s younger brother, Abdullah Qeshta, clawed Wednesday with his bare hands through blasted concrete and twisted rebar, his face shining with sweat and smeared with the dust of his family’s life together. For three days, running on adrenaline, and anguish, he and the civil defense workers said they took breaks only to perform daily prayers and to sleep.
Alshaar, looking on, said she felt herself losing hope.
But suddenly, the men began to shout. They heaved stones and shards of concrete to the side.
In the dirt were ragged pieces of 37-year-old Ibrahim’s navy blue pajamas, the ones he was wearing on May 6, 2024, when Israeli airstrikes sent everyone running. Ibrahim was running in the opposite direction, shouting to his mother that he’d be back in a second and was grabbing blankets inside. Then the house was struck, the walls collapsing onto him.
“That’s my brother’s hair, I’m certain, it is him,” Abdullah Qeshta said, his voice trembling. “Oh God, thank you, God.”
Ibrahim’s body was in a state of decay. But in some sense, Alshaar said, she felt “content.” She could give her son the dignity of a proper burial. She could find a place to mourn him.
“He can rest now,” she said.
In an interview, Gaza health official Zaher al-Wahidi put the number of disappeared people and unrecovered bodies at roughly 8,000, based on reports from families about their missing loved ones.
It’s an estimate that’s impossible to verify more than 15 months after Hamas launched its cross-border attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, abducting some 250 people, killing about 1,200, mostly civilians, and triggering the Israeli military’s retaliatory campaign.
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