Families’ agonising search for answers as thousands still missing in Gaza
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Families’ agonising search for answers as thousands still missing in Gaza
Image source: al Madhoun family
Image caption: Ahmed al Madhoun, who has Down’s syndrome, has been missing since May 2025
By Jon Donnison
Reporting from Jerusalem
Published 3 hours ago
Ahmed al Madhoun looked like a man who, despite the hardship, loved life. A cheeky, chunky little fellow with an exuberant smile.
From her partially destroyed home in Gaza City, his mother Majdiya shows us videos of him on her phone.
In one, Ahmed is cuddling a kitten. He sticks out his tongue and squeals with glee. In another, he belly flops into a swimming pool, before emerging from the water grinning from ear to ear.
"Everyone was his friend," Majdiya tells the BBC. "He was loved wherever he went, and he always had a smile on his face."
But Ahmed, who has Down’s syndrome, is missing. The 21-year-old disappeared in May 2025 after popping to the local shop.
At the time, the war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel was raging.
That day there were Israeli strikes in the area, and Majdiya fears her son is dead. But she doesn’t know for certain.
"My God, I am not at peace," she says. "I have not lost hope but whether they find him alive or dead, buried under the rubble, only then will I be at peace."
Image source: Al Madoun family
Pain like Majdiya’s is felt by mothers all over Gaza.
More than 73,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its military campaign, including about 1,200 since a ceasefire was announced last October, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry—figures considered reliable by the UN.
Israeli media reported in January that a senior Israeli security source said the military accepts the figures are accurate.
But the true number of dead Palestinians could be significantly higher. The health ministry’s death toll doesn’t count bodies buried under the rubble, meaning many of the missing are not part of the count.
The Red Cross says it has received more than 5,000 requests to trace missing people who could be buried amid the destruction. The Civil Defence agency in Gaza believes the number of missing people is over 8,000.
Bodies are being discovered on a daily basis.
Earlier this month, a mass funeral took place in Gaza City for more than a hundred people killed in an Israeli attack in 2023. Their remains were only recently recovered and identified, allowing them to be laid to rest.
The Red Cross says recovering bodies is difficult given the scale of the destruction and a lack of bulldozers.
In many cases, identifying the remains is also challenging when people have been dead for so long and with a lack of DNA testing, due to Israeli restrictions on what can enter Gaza.
Ahmed al Madhoun’s family knows he may well have been killed—but they also fear he may have been detained by Israeli security forces.
Image caption: Majdiya al Madhoun has been searching for her son for more than a year
Over almost three years of war, Israeli forces have detained approximately 7,000 Palestinians from Gaza, more than 5,000 of whom were later released without ever being charged, according to the Israel-based Public Committee Against Torture, external.
As of this month, around 1,300 detainees from Gaza were being held in Israeli jails without charge or trial, according to the Israeli human rights group HaMoked. The group says these figures do not include Gaza detainees held directly by the Israeli militia.
