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GAZA CITY: When Israeli bombs began falling, Mohammad Al-Najjar, his wife and six children fled their house in southern Gaza in the dead of night, dispersing in terror alongside hundreds of others from their neighborhood.
When the dust settled and Al-Najjar huddled with his family in a shelter miles away, his son Ahmad, 23, was missing. After daybreak, the family searched nearby hospitals and asked neighbors if they had seen him.
There was no trace. Nearly two years later, they are still looking.
Thousands in Gaza are looking for relatives who are missing. Some are buried under destroyed buildings. Others, like Al-Najjar’s son, simply disappeared during Israeli military operations.
The Israeli military has taken an unknown number of bodies, saying it is searching for Israeli hostages or Palestinians it identifies as militants. It has returned several hundred corpses with no identification to Gaza, where they were buried in mass graves.

GAZA: Two years of Israeli bombardment of Gaza has piled grief upon grief for displaced Palestinian Inas Abu Maamar.

In the first days of the war, a photograph showed Abu Maamar stricken in a hospital morgue, cradling the shrouded body of her five-year-old niece Saly.
Since then, Israeli airstrikes and tank shells have killed many of her close relatives and left her bereaved, hungry and homeless, caring for her orphaned young nephew.

Saly was killed when an Israeli missile struck the family home in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Photographer Mohammed Salem found Abu Maamar embracing her body at the Nasser Hospital morgue in Khan Younis on Oct. 17, 2023.
The blast also killed Abu Maamar’s aunt and uncle, her sister-in-law and her cousins, as well as Saly’s baby sister Seba. This summer, her father and her brother Ramez, Saly’s father, were killed while bringing food back to the family. They are among more than 67,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. 
Thousands more are believed to be lying dead under the rubble but not counted in the official death toll.
“The war destroyed us all. It destroyed our family, destroyed our homes. It left pain and loss in our hearts,” said Abu Maamar, who is now 38.
Abu Maamar and her remaining relatives have fled waves of Israeli bombing and ground incursions several times over the past two years and are now living in a crowded tent encampment on bare sand near the beach.
Conditions are harsh. Sickness is rife. Food and clean water are scarce. Israeli bombardments terrify the traumatized population.
Abu Maamar’s greatest concern is for her nephew Ahmed, the son of Ramez and younger brother of Saly.
Having lost his mother, both sisters and maternal grandparents 10 days into the conflict, he lost his father and paternal grandfather when they were killed while fetching food in June after it had run out the previous day, Abu Maamar said.
“His father would take him around, play with him, take him to the beach, take him around to see his aunts,” Abu Maamar said of her nephew.