“My son’s bones are scattered on the ground.”

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Fergal Keane

Special correspondent

The BBC showed Lena Al Dabbah a photo of her dead son Aya on a mobile phone.BBC

Lina Al-Dabbah shows a picture of her daughter Aya

Everything is mixed together. The child’s multi-colored bag. Running shoes. A perforated iron pot. Beds, chairs, cookers, lamps; Broken windows, mirrors, glass of drinking glasses. A piece of clothing.

These may be indicators of the last torn, dust-covered items. Often they are dead people lying near the floor of the rubble.

“After the Israeli occupation forces left Rafah, we received about 150 calls from civilians about the bodies of their relatives in their homes,” said Haitham al-Homs, director of emergency and ambulance services at the Civil Defense Agency in Rafah. At the southern end of the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian health officials estimate that 10,000 people are missing. Where there are no obvious signs such as clothing on the surface, the search teams rely on information from relatives and neighbors or follow the smell of death from the rubble.

Warning: This story contains disturbing content

Haitham Al Homs, a man in orange high-vision gear and protective forensic equipment, stands in front of an ambulance in Rafah.

Haitham al-Homs, director of emergency and ambulance services in Rafah

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

At the end of each day, Mr. Holmes updates the attendance list. His team carefully digs through the wreckage, realizing that they are searching for the remains of a broken human. Usually what is returned is no more than a pile of bones. Israeli high explosives detonated and killed many. The bones and pieces of clothing were placed in a white body bag on which Mr Holmes had written the Arabic word “majhol”. It means “unknown”.

A gloved hand holds what look like teeth and parts of the jaw found in the Rafa debris

Human remains among the ruins in Rafah

Osama Saleh, a resident of Rafah, returned to his house after the ceasefire and found a skeleton inside. His skull was fractured. Mr. Saleh estimated that the body had been there for four to five months. “We are emotional people…I can’t tell you how tragic the tragedy is,” he says.

As those who have witnessed mass death often testify, being surrounded by the stench of decomposing corpses every day is a very sad thing.

Osama Saleh, who lives in Rafah, was shocked in the camera

When Osama Saleh returned, he found a skeleton in his house

“The bodies are terrible. We are seeing terror,” Osama Saleh said. “I swear it’s a painful feeling, I cried.”

Families are also reaching hospitals to search for his body. In the compound of the European Hospital in southern Gaza, collections of bones and clothing are spread over body bags.

19-year-old Abdul Salam Al-Mughair from Rafah went missing in the Shaboura area. Uncle Zaki said that if you went there during the war, it was a place you never came back from. “So we didn’t go looking for him because of that. We weren’t going back.”

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

“He is 99% sure that the body is his,” said Mr. Abu Kress, “but now we need final confirmation from his brother, if they are close people, to confirm that the pants and shoes are his.”

Young men are wearing white body bags

The brother of missing teenager Abdul Salam examines the clothes found with his bones.

Soon, the brother arrived from the tented Al-Mawsi refugee camp, also in southern Gaza. He had a picture of Abdul Salam on his phone. It was a photo of his running shoes.

He knelt in front of the body bag and pulled the cover back. He touched his skull, his clothes. He saw his shoes. His eyes were full of tears. The ID is complete.

Another family moved across the row of bags. There was a grandmother, her daughter, an adult sister and a teenager. The boy was kept at the back of the group while the old woman and her child watched under the cover of the body bag. They stared at each other for a few seconds and then hugged each other sadly.

After this, the family took the body with the help of the hospital staff. They were crying but no one was crying loudly.

Caption A teenage girl smiling in a photograph holding her fingers in a V-signHandwriting

Aya al-Dabeh, 13, was killed while at school.

Aya al-Dabeh was 13 years old and lived 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 when the fighting started, Aya went to the upstairs bathroom of the school and – her family says – was shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper. The Israel Defense Forces say they do not target civilians and attack Hamas from civilian areas. During the war, the United Nations Human Rights Office said, “There was heavy shelling by Israeli forces in densely populated areas, resulting in apparently unlawful killings, including of unarmed bystanders.”

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

When the Israeli army took over the school, Lena fled south. She left with four other children – two daughters and two sons – to meet her husband, who had left earlier with the couple’s other children. Lena had no choice but to leave her son where she lay, hoping that she would come back after peace and find her body for a proper burial.

“Aya was a very kind girl and everyone loved her. She loved everyone, she loved her teachers and her studies, and she was very good at school. She wished everyone well,” says Lina. When the ceasefire came, Lena asked her relatives still in the north to visit Aya’s grave. The news was devastating.

Family members in the tent show Aya pictures on their mobile phones

Surviving family members look at Aya’s photos

“They informed us that her head was in one place, her legs were in another place, her ribs were in another place. The person who went to visit her was shocked and sent us the photos,” she said.

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

The relatives collected the bones and soon Lena and her family will travel north to take Ayan’s body to the proper grave. For Lena, there is an endless sadness, and an unanswered question – the same question as many parents who have lost children in Gaza. What could they have done differently given the circumstances of the war?

“I couldn’t take her from where she was buried,” says Lena. Then, “Where could I take her?”

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