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

Everything blends together. Children’s multi-colored backpack. Running shoes. A steel pot pierced by shrapnel. Details of beds, chairs, stoves, lampshades; glass of broken windows, mirrors, glasses. Scraps of clothing.

These last crushed, dust-covered objects may be markers. Often they belong to the dead lying near the surface of the rubble.

“Since the Israeli occupation forces left Rafah, we have received about 150 calls from civilians about the bodies of their relatives under their houses,” said Haitham al-Homs, director of the Civil Defense Agency’s Emergency and Ambulance Service in Rafah. in the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip.

According to the estimates of the Palestinian health authorities, about 10,000 people are considered missing. Where there is no obvious sign on the surface, such as clothing, search teams rely on information from relatives and neighbors or follow the smell of death emanating from the ruins.

WARNING: This story contains disturbing content

The Israeli government has banned the BBC and other international news organizations from entering Gaza and from independent reporting. We rely on local journalists we trust to record the experiences of people like those searching for missing persons.

At the end of each day, Mr. Holmes updates the list of finds. His team painstakingly digs through the rubble, aware that they are searching for fragments of a broken humanity. Often no more than a pile of bones is recovered. Israeli high-explosive bombs tore up and blew to pieces many of the dead. The bones and scraps 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 to his home after the ceasefire to find a skeleton inside. The skull was fractured. Mr. Saleh believes the body had been there for four to five months. “We are people with feelings… I can’t tell you how pathetic this tragedy is,” he says.

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

“The bodies are terrifying. We see horror,” says Osama Saleh. “I swear it hurts, I cried.”

Families also arrive at the hospital to search for remains. In the courtyard of the European Hospital in southern Gaza, collections of bones and clothing are laid out on body bags.

Abdul Salam al-Mugayer, 19, from Rafah, went missing in the Shabur district; according to his uncle Zack, it was a place he never came back from when he went there during the war. “That’s why we didn’t look for him there, we wouldn’t come back.”

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

“We are 99% sure that the body is his,” says Mr. Abu Hrays, “but now we need final confirmation from his brother, the people closest to him, to make sure that the pants and shoes are his.”

A brother soon arrived from Al-Mawasi refugee tent camp, also in southern Gaza. He had a picture of Abdul Salam on his phone. There was a picture of his sneakers.

He knelt down in front of the body bag and pulled back the covers. He touched the skull, the clothes. He saw the shoes. There were tears in his eyes. Identification has been completed.

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

After that, the family, with the help of hospital workers, removed the remains. They cried, but no one cried aloud.

Aya al-Daba was 13 years old and lived with her family and hundreds of other refugees at a school in Tal al-Hawa, in the northern Gaza city. She was one of nine children. One day at the beginning of the war, Aya went to the bathroom upstairs at the school and, according to her family, an Israeli sniper shot her in the chest. The Israel Defense Forces say they do not target civilians and blame Hamas for the attack from civilian areas. During the war, the UN Human Rights Office said that “Israeli forces engaged in intense shelling in densely populated areas, resulting in apparently unlawful killings, including of unarmed bystanders.”

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

When the Israeli military took over the school, Lina fled south. She traveled with four other children – two daughters and two sons – to be reunited 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 retrieve the remains for a proper burial once peace came.

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

“We were informed that her head is in one place, her legs are in another place and her ribs are in another place. The person who visited her was shocked and sent us a photo,” she says.

“When I saw her, I could not understand how my daughter was taken out of the grave, and how was she eaten by dogs? I can’t control my nerves.’

Relatives have collected the bones, and soon Lina and her family will travel north to transfer Ai’s remains to a proper grave. For Lina, there is a grief that has no end, and a question that has no answer – the same question that many parents who have lost children in Gaza ask. What could they have done differently under the circumstances of the war? “I could not take her from where she is buried,” says Lina. Then he asks: “Where could I put her?”

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