‘My daughter’s bones were scattered on the ground’

Everything is confused together. A colorful baby bag. A running shoe. A steel pot pierced by shrapnel. Pieces for beds, furniture, cookware, lamps; broken window glass, glasses, drinking glasses. Clothing fabrics.

The final torn, dust-covered material may be a marker. They usually belong to dead people who are near the ruins.

“Since the Israeli army left Rafah, we have had 150 calls from civilians about the presence of the bodies of their relatives under the house,” said Haitham al-Homs, head of Emergency and Ambulance Services at the Civil Defense in Rafah, at the very end of the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian health officials say 10,000 people are missing. Where there is no obvious sign such as clothing on the surface, search parties rely on information from relatives and neighbors, or follow the scent of death that emanates from the remains.

WARNING: This article contains disturbing content

The Israeli government has banned the BBC and other international news organizations from entering Gaza and reporting independently. We rely on reliable local journalists to document the events of people like the missing persons.

At the end of each day, Homs updates the list of those found. His team carefully digs through the debris, knowing that they are searching for pieces of broken people. Often what is found is just a pile of bones. Israeli explosives blasted and crushed many dead. The bones and pieces of clothing are placed in white bags on which the Homs write the Arabic word “majhoul”. It means “unknown”.

A resident of Rafah, Osama Saleh, returned to his home after the blockade and found a mask inside. The skull was fractured. Mr. Saleh believes that the body lay there for four to five months. “We are sensitive people … I can’t tell you how bad this tragedy is,” he says.

Being surrounded every day by the smell of rotting bodies is a very sad experience, as people who have seen the effects of mass death often testify.

“The bodies are terrible. We see horror,” says Osama Saleh. “I swear I’m in pain, I’m crying.”

Families have also been arriving at hospitals to search for remains. In the yard of the European Hospital in southern Gaza, a collection of bones and clothes are laid out on body bags.

Abdul Salam al-Mughayer, 19, from Rafah, went missing in Shaboura area; according to Zaki’s uncle, it is a place you have not been to if you have been there during the war. “So, we didn’t go looking for him there for that reason. We wouldn’t go back.”

Zaki believes that the bones and clothes in front of him belong to the missing Abdul Salam. He is standing with a hospital worker, Jihad Abu Khreis, waiting for Abdul Salam’s brother to arrive.

“I am 99% sure that the body is his,” Abu Khreis says, “but now we need final confirmation from his brother, the people closest to him, to confirm that the pants and shoes are his.”

The brother had just arrived from al-Mawasi tented refugee camp, also in southern Gaza. He had a picture of Abdul Salam on his phone. There was a picture of his running shoes.

He knelt before the body bag and pulled the lid off. He touched the skull, the clothes. He saw the shoes. There were tears in his eyes. The identification was complete.

A couple moved to the body bag line. There was a grandmother, her son, her older sister, and a baby. The child was kept at the back of the group while the old woman and her child looked under the cover of the body bag. They looked at each other for a few seconds and then hugged each other sadly.

After this, the family, with the help of the hospital staff, carried the remains. He was crying, but no one was crying.

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

One day at the beginning of the war Aya went to the bathroom above the school and – his family says – he was shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper. The Israeli army says it does not target civilians and blames Hamas for attacks on civilians. During the war, the UN Human Rights Office reported that “there has been heavy firing by Israeli forces in populated areas resulting in unlawful killings, including of unarmed civilians.”

The family placed Aya on the side of 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 by the weather.

When the Israeli army overran the school, Lina fled south. She went with four other children – two daughters and two sons – to meet her husband who had already gone with the other children of the family. Lina had no choice but to leave her son where he slept, hoping that he would come back to collect the body for a proper burial when peace came.

“Aya was a very kind girl, and everyone loved her. She loved everyone, her teachers and her studies, and she was very good at school. She wanted the best for everyone,” Lina says. When the time to end the war came, Lina asked relatives who still live in the north to visit Aya’s grave. The news was very painful.

“They have informed us that his head is in one place, his legs are in another, while his ribs are in another. Those who went to visit him were very surprised and sent us the pictures,” he says.

“When I saw her, I couldn’t understand how my daughter was brought out of her grave, and how the dogs ate her? I can’t control my nerves.”

Relatives have collected the bones and soon Lina and her family will leave for the north to carry Aya’s body to the appropriate grave. For Lina, there is an endless sadness, and a question that has no answer – the same question that many parents who have lost children in Gaza have. What would they have done differently, the conditions of the war being what they were?

Lina says Lina. Then he asks: “Where should I go with him?”

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