“My daughter’s bones were scattered on the ground”

Everything mixes together. The child’s multi-colored backpack. A running shoe. A steel pot punctured by shrapnel. Pieces of beds, chairs, stoves, lampshades; the glass of broken windows, mirrors, drinking glasses. Remnants of clothing.

These last shredded and dust-covered objects can serve as markers. These are often dead people lying close to the surface of the rubble.

“Since the Israeli occupation forces withdrew from Rafah, we have received around 150 calls from civilians regarding the presence of the bodies of their loved ones under the houses,” said Haitham al-Homs, director of emergency services and ambulance of the civil defense agency in Rafah. at the southern end of the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian health authorities estimate that 10,000 people are missing. When there is no obvious marker like clothing on the surface, search teams rely on information from relatives and neighbors, or follow the smell of death wafting from the ruins.

WARNING: This story contains distressing content

The Israeli government has banned the BBC and other international news organizations from entering Gaza and reporting independently there. We depend on trusted local journalists to record the experiences of people like those searching for the missing.

At the end of each day, Mr. Homs updates the list of people found. His team searches the rubble carefully, aware that they are searching for fragments of broken humanity. Often what is recovered is just a pile of bones. Israeli explosive bombs destroyed and reduced many deaths to smithereens. The bones and remains of clothing are placed in white body bags on which Mr Homs writes the Arabic word “majhoul”. It means “unidentified”.

Rafah resident Osama Saleh returned home after the ceasefire and found a skeleton inside. The skull was fractured. Mr. Saleh estimates that the body was there for four to five months. “We are humans with feelings…I can’t tell you how miserable the tragedy is,” he says.

Being surrounded every day by the smell of decomposing bodies is a deeply disturbing experience, as those who have witnessed the aftermath of mass death often attest.

“The bodies are terrifying. We are witnessing terror,” says Osama Saleh. “I swear it’s a painful feeling, I cried.”

Families also arrived at hospitals to search for remains. In the courtyard of the European Hospital in southern Gaza, collections of bones and clothes are spread out on body bags.

Abdul Salam al-Mughayer, 19, from Rafah, disappeared in Shaboura region; according to his uncle Zaki, it was a place you wouldn’t return from if you went there during the war. “So we didn’t go looking for him there for that reason. We wouldn’t have come back.”

Zaki thinks that a set of bones and clothes in front of him belong to the missing Abdul Salam. He stands alongside hospital worker Jihad Abu Khreis, who awaits the arrival of Abdul Salam’s brother.

“He is 99% sure that the body belongs to him,” says Mr. Abu Khreis, “but we now need final confirmation from his brother, from his relatives, to be sure that the pants and shoes belong to him.” .

Shortly after, the brother arrived from al-Mawasi tent refugee camp, also in southern Gaza. He had a photo of Abdul Salam on his phone. There was a photo of his running shoes.

He knelt down in front of the body bag and removed the lid. He touched the head, the clothes. He saw the shoes. He had tears in his eyes. The identification was complete.

Another family moved along the row of body bags. There was a grandmother, her son, an adult sister and a toddler. The child was kept at the back of the group while the elderly woman and her son looked under the body bag cover. They looked at each other for a few seconds then kissed sadly.

After that, the family, helped by hospital staff, took the remains away. They were crying, but no one was crying out loud.

Aya al Dabeh was 13 years old and living with her family and hundreds of other refugees in a school in Tal al Hawa in the northern Gaza City. She was one of nine children.

One day, early in the war, Aya went to the bathroom upstairs at school and – according to her family – was shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper. The Israel Defense Forces say it does not target civilians and accuses Hamas of attacking from civilian areas. During the war, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said there had been “intense shooting by Israeli forces in densely populated areas, leading to apparently unlawful killings, including of bystanders unarmed.”

The family buried Aya next to the school and her mother Lina al-Dabah, 43, wrapped her in a blanket “to protect her from the rain and sun” in case the grave was disturbed and exposed to elements.

When the Israeli army took over the school, Lina fled south. She left with four other children – two daughters and two sons – to reunite with her husband who had left earlier with the couple’s other children. Lina had no choice but to leave her daughter where she lay, hoping to return and collect the remains for a proper burial once peace returned.

“Aya was a very nice girl and everyone loved her. She loved everyone, her teachers and her studies, and she was very good at school. She wished everyone good luck,” says Lina. When the ceasefire came, Lina asked her relatives still living in the north to check on Aya’s grave. The news was devastating.

“They informed us that his head was in one place, his legs in another and his ribs elsewhere. The one who went to visit him was shocked and sent us the photos,” she said.

“When I saw her, I couldn’t understand how my daughter had been taken out of her grave and how the dogs had eaten her? I couldn’t control my nerves.”

Relatives have collected the bones and soon Lina and her family will travel north to transport Aya’s remains to a suitable grave. For Lina, there is endless grief and an unanswered question – the same question that faces so many parents who lost their children in Gaza. What could they have done differently, the circumstances of the war being what they were?

“I couldn’t get her out of the place where she was buried,” Lina explains. Then she asks, “Where could I have taken him?”

With additional reporting from Malak Hassouneh, Alice Doyard, Adam Campbell.