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.