Gaza Families Search for Over 8,000 Missing as Bodies Found Daily Amid Rubble
- A mother in Gaza City is searching for her 21-year-old son with Down's syndrome who vanished in May 2025 after a trip to a local shop
- The Red Cross has received over 5,000 tracing requests while Gaza's Civil Defence believes more than 8,000 people are unaccounted for
- Israeli forces have detained about 7,000 Palestinians from Gaza since the war began, with around 1,300 still held without charge or trial
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Families across Gaza are living with the anguish of not knowing whether missing relatives are dead or detained, as the number of unaccounted-for people surpasses 8,000, according to Gaza's Civil Defence agency.
Ahmed al Madhoun, a 21-year-old with Down's syndrome, has been missing since May 2025, when he stepped out to a nearby shop and never returned.
Source: Getty Images
According to BBC, his mother, Majdiya, told the BBC her son was universally liked, always smiling, a young man who made friends everywhere he went.
That day, Israeli strikes hit the surrounding area, and Majdiya cannot be sure whether her son was killed, buried under rubble, or taken into custody.
"My God, I am not at peace," she said. "I have not lost hope but whether they find him alive or dead, buried under the rubble, only then will I be at peace."
Scale of the missing
Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures the UN considers reliable, reports more than 73,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its military campaign, including roughly 1,200 since a ceasefire was announced last October. Israeli media reported in January that a senior Israeli security source said the military accepts the figures are accurate.
Even so, experts believe the true death toll is higher because the count excludes those buried beneath collapsed buildings.
The Red Cross has logged more than 5,000 requests to trace missing individuals, and bodies are being recovered every day. Earlier this month, a mass funeral in Gaza City laid to rest more than a hundred people killed in 2023 whose remains had only recently been identified.
The Red Cross says recovering and identifying remains is made harder by a shortage of bulldozers and limited access to DNA testing, restrictions it attributes to Israeli controls on what enters Gaza.
Source: Getty Images
Al Jazeera journalist killed in Israeli drone strike in Gaza
Legit.ng earlier reported that Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera announced on Saturday, June 20, 2026, that its journalist Ahmed Wishah was killed in an Israeli drone strike targeting a house in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.
The strike also wounded several people, according to the channel’s correspondent. Al Jazeera described Wishah as a cameraman who had been reporting from Gaza. His death marks the latest loss for the network, which has seen several of its journalists killed in the territory since the war began on October 7, 2023.
Source: Legit.ng
