Saleh al Mughair began scrolling through the photos one by one, enlarging some, skipping others, then going back to them again. I could not understand what he was looking for.
“He is looking for his missing son,” my father whispered to me.
Since the beginning of summer, my father’s friends have gathered occasionally outside our tent overlooking the sea in the al-Mawasi displacement camp in southern Gaza. After more than a year of living here, the tents are more than just places to sleep—they have become our neighborhood. Everyone knows one another, sharing tea, news, and the same uncertainty.
During one of those gatherings in mid-June, I sat with them, scrolling through my phone, when I received a notification announcing the release of a report about bodies recovered in Gaza, accompanied by photos and names. I began reading the news aloud to them, as I often did when we met up outside the tent. Before I could finish, Saleh reached for my phone and silently began scrolling through the photos, as though he were searching for a face he recognized.
Amid the devastation caused by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza have grieved the death of their loved ones and destruction of their homes. But thousands of families continue to live with a different kind of loss, one that offers neither certainty nor the chance to grieve. They are the families of the missing, still searching for answers about the fate of their loved ones.
More than 11,000 Palestinians remain missing in Gaza. As a result, scouring news about recovered bodies, missing persons announcements, and the names of released detainees has become part of the daily routine for families waiting for one thing above all: an answer. Many of the missing are believed to remain beneath the rubble, where the lack of heavy machinery and forensic resources means that some may never be recovered or identified, prolonging the uncertainty for their families.
Saleh joined in on many of those evenings sitting with my father and his friends, but whenever the conversation turned to his missing son, Khaled, his expression would always change.
Before the war, Khaled rarely left his father’s side. The fourteen-year-old loved school, but he also dreamed of becoming a carpenter like his father. He spent most of his time beside him in the workshop, learning the trade step by step. After the war began, he helped his father fetch water and look after the family throughout their repeated displacement. Those close to them even called him “Little Saleh” because of how attached he was to his father. Saleh told us he always believed Khaled would one day take over the workshop.
The family was able to return to their home in Rafah in January 2025. But after Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas that March and resumed its military assault on Gaza, Saleh’s family was forced to flee Rafah once again, forced to abandon their home, their workshop, and everything they could not carry. They fled to al-Mawasi in southern Gaza amid shelling and gunfire with only a few belongings, leaving behind their clothes and important official documents.
The day before he disappeared, Khaled had told his family he wanted to return home to collect them. Saleh told us Khaled spent the rest of that day saying he would leave early the following morning and be back soon, but the family refused to give him permission because it was too dangerous. The next morning, as Saleh was getting ready to go to the market, he noticed his black cap was gone. So was Khaled. His son had gone back to Rafah alone.
That was the beginning of a search that continues to this day. Saleh has searched hospitals that have received the dead and the wounded, checked the names of released detainees, spoken with relatives and friends, and looked everywhere he thought his son might have gone. He hasn’t found any traces of Khaled, but he also hasn’t found evidence that Khaled was killed, nor that he’s being held in Israeli detention. At the same time, not a single piece of news reassured him that his son was still alive.
The search slowly has slowly become a life of waiting.
“Every day I follow the news,” Saleh told us. “Whenever bodies are returned to Gaza, I go to the hospital to see if my son is among them.”
More than a year after Khaled disappeared, every report about recovered bodies and every announcement of released detainees sends Saleh searching again. Every new list of names reopens the wound. Every new photograph carries the possibility of ending more than a year of waiting.
Saleh is not the only one living with that uncertainty. Khaled’s family members say his mother could not bear her son’s disappearance. Her health has deteriorated, and she spent a couple days in the hospital with low blood pressure due to lack of sufficient food and water. While Saleh has moved from one hospital to another and searched through lists of names, she has struggled to live with an absence she could not explain. The family has not lost Khaled in a way that allows them to mourn him, but neither can they live as though he were still there.
Today, Saleh and his family live in a tent in al-Mawasi; Saleh lost not only his livelihood, but also the place where he had always imagined Khaled would one day stand beside him. When he speaks about his son, he does not speak like a father whose story has ended. He speaks like a father still waiting to find out what happened.
“The hardest part is not the truth,” he told us. “It’s not knowing.”
He says that if he had known from the beginning that Khaled had been killed, he would have accepted God’s will. Instead, the waiting leaves him unable to grieve and unable to hold on fully to hope.
By the end of that evening, Saleh handed my phone back to me, and the conversation slowly returned to normal. I have never looked at reports about recovered bodies the same way since. Now, whenever I come across news about the missing or newly recovered bodies, I find myself stopping at every photograph of a boy wearing a striped shirt or a black cap, remembering that somewhere, Saleh is still searching those same images for his son.
“I just want to know the truth so my heart and my mind can finally rest,” Saleh said.
That was the first time I truly understood that for the families of Gaza’s missing, the deepest pain is not waiting for a miracle. It is waiting for an answer.