Everything is mixed together. Colorful backpack for kids. A pair of running shoes. A steel pot punctured by shrapnel. Fragments of beds, chairs, cooking utensils, lampshades; broken window glass, mirrors, drinking glasses. Scraps of clothing.

These final shredded, dust-covered items can be used as markers. They usually belong to the dead lying near the surface of the ruins.

Haitham Holmes, director of emergency and ambulance services at the Rafah Civil Defense Agency, said: “Since the Israeli occupying forces withdrew from Rafah, we have received around 150 calls from civilians saying that there were bodies of their relatives under their houses. ” Located at the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian health authorities estimate that 10,000 people are missing. Where there are no obvious markers on the surface, such as clothing, search teams rely on information from relatives and neighbors, or the smell of death that emanates along the ruins.

WARNING: This story contains distressing content

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

At the end of each day, Mr. Holmes updates the list of those who have been discovered. His team carefully excavated the ruins, realizing they were looking for broken shards of humanity. Often, what is recovered is just a pile of bones. Many of the dead were blown to smithereens by Israeli high-explosive bombs. Bones and fragments of clothing were placed in white body bags, on which Mr Holmes wrote the Arabic word “majhoul”. Meaning “unidentified”.

Osama Saleh, a resident of Rafah, returned home after the ceasefire and found a skeleton inside. Skull fractured. Mr Saleh estimated the body lay there for four to five months. “We are human beings with feelings… I can’t express to you how tragic this tragedy is,” he said.

Being surrounded by the smell of rotting corpses on a daily basis is a deeply unsettling experience, as those who have witnessed the aftermath of mass death will often attest.

“The bodies were horrific. We saw horror,” Osama Saleh said. “I swear it was a painful feeling and I cried.”

Family members have also arrived at the hospital to look for the body. Bones and clothing were scattered on body bags in the courtyard of the European Hospital in southern Gaza.

Abdul Salam al-Mughayer, 19, from Rafah, disappeared in the Shaboura area; according to his uncle Zaki, if you went there during the war, you could not come back. “So, for that reason, we didn’t go there to find him. We wouldn’t have come back.”

Zaki believed the set of bones and clothes in front of him belonged to the missing Abdul Salam. He stood with hospital worker Jihad Abu Khreis, waiting for Abdul Salam’s brother to arrive.

“We are 99 percent sure that the body is his,” Mr. Abu Herres said, “but now we need final confirmation from his brother, the person closest to him, to make sure the pants and shoes are his.”

Soon, the younger brother arrived from the Mawasi tent refugee camp, also in southern Gaza. He had a picture of Abdul Salam on his phone. There is a picture of his running shoes.

He knelt in front of the body bag and opened the lid. He touched the skull and felt the clothes. He saw the shoes. There were tears in his eyes. Identification completed.

Another family moves along a row of body bags. There is a grandmother, her son, an adult sister and a toddler. The child was placed at the very back of the crowd while the old woman and her son searched under the lid of the body bag. They stared for a few seconds, then hugged each other sadly.

Later, the family members took the body away with the help of hospital staff. They were crying, but no one was crying loudly.

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

One day at the beginning of the war, Aya went to the school’s upstairs bathroom and, her family said, she was shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper. The Israel Defense Forces say they do not target civilians and accuse Hamas of launching attacks from civilian areas. During the war, the UN Human Rights Office said, “Israeli forces engaged in heavy shooting in densely populated areas, resulting in clearly unlawful killings, including of unarmed bystanders.”

The family buried Aiya next to the school, and her mother Lina al-Dabah, 43, wrapped her in a blanket to “protect her from the rain and the sun” to prevent the grave from being disturbed and exposed. in natural environment.

When the Israeli army took over the school, Lena fled to the south. She went with her four other children – two daughters and two sons – to reunite with her husband, who had gone earlier with the couple’s other children. Lena had no choice but to leave her daughter where she was, hoping to return when peace came to retrieve the body and give it a proper burial.

“Aya was a very kind girl and everyone loved her. She used to love everyone, her teachers and her studies and she did very well in school. She wished everyone well,” Lena said. After the ceasefire was signed, Lena asked relatives still living in the north to visit Aya’s grave. The news is devastating.

“They told us her head was in one place, her legs were in another place and her ribs were in other places. People who went to see her were shocked and sent us pictures,” she said.

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

Relatives have collected the bones and soon Lena and her family will travel north to take Aya’s remains to a suitable grave. For Lena, the grief is endless and a question without answers – the same question that plagues many parents who have lost their children in Gaza. In the war environment at that time, what else could they have done differently?

“I couldn’t take her away from where she was buried,” Lena said. Then she asked, “Where can I take her?”

Additional reporting by Malak Hassouneh, Alice Doyard and Adam Campbell.