Everything is mixed together. A multi -colored baby backpack. Running shoes. Flagous steel bowl. Parts of the family, chairs, publications and phenomenon. A cup of broken windows, mirrors and drinking glasses. Passes of clothes.

These elements can be covered with recent dust. Often they belong to the dead dumped near the surface of the rubble.

“Since the Israeli occupation forces withdrew from Rafah, we have received about 150 civilians from civilians about the presence of the bodies of their relatives under homes,” said Haitham Humes, Director of Emergency Services and Absorption at the Civil Defense Agency. In the far south of the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian health authorities estimate that 10,000 people are missing. When there is no clear mark like clothes on the surface, the search teams depend on information from relatives and neighbors, or follow the scent of death that radiates the rubble.

Warning: This story contains sad content

The Israeli government banned the BBC and other international news organizations from entering Gaza and reporting independently. We rely on trusted local journalists to record the experiences of people like those looking for missing persons.

At the end of each day, Mr. Homs updates the existing list of that. His team is carefully drilling the rubble, realizing that they are looking for fragments of broken humanity. Often it is recovered nothing more than a pile of bones. High explosive bombs in Israel exploded and distorted a lot of deaths. The bones of clothing and clothes are placed in the white body bags on which Mr. Hums is written by the Arabic word “majhhoul”. This means “anonymous”.

One of the residents of Rafah, Osama Saleh, returned to his home after a ceasefire and found a skeleton inside. The skull was broken. Mr. Saleh believes that the body lies there for four to five months. “We are human beings in feeling … I cannot convey to you how misery of the tragedy.”

Each day is surrounded by the scent of decomposing objects is a very disturbing experience, because those who have witnessed the effects of mass death often testify.

“The bodies are terrifying. We see terrorism.” “I swear to be a painful feeling, I cried.”

Families also arrived at hospitals to search for residue. In the European Hospital yard in southern Gaza, groups of bones and clothes are spread over body bags.

Abdel -Salim Al -Manayer, 19, from Rafah, lost in the Shapora region; According to his uncle, Zaki, it was a place that you did not return if you went there during the war. “Therefore, we did not go to search for it for this reason. We won’t go back.”

Zaki believes a group of bones and clothes in front of him belonging to the lost Abdul Salam. He stands with a hospital worker, Jihad Abu Khreis, pending the arrival of Abdel Salam’s brother.

Abu Khreis says: “99 % certainly is that the body is for it, but we now need the final confirmation of his brother, the closest people to him, to make sure that it is trousers and shoes for him.”

Soon after the brother’s arrival from the refugee camp in Al -Malassi, also in southern Gaza. He had a picture of Abdul Salam on his phone. There was a picture of his running shoes.

Known in front of the body bag and pull the cap. I touched the skull, clothes. He saw the shoes. There were tears in his eyes. The identity was complete.

Another family moved along the row of body bags. There was Jeddah, her son, her adult sister, and a young child. The child remained in the back of the group while the elderly woman and her son looked under the cover of the body bag. Determine for a few seconds, then embrace each other in sadness.

After that, the family, with the help of hospital workers, removed the remains. They were crying, but no one cried out loud.

Haya Al -Dab was thirteen years old and lived with her family and hundreds of other refugees in a school in Tal Al -Hawa, in Gaza City in the north. She was one of nine children.

One day at the beginning of the war, Aya went to go to the bathroom on the upper floor of the school – and her family says – she was shot in her chest by an Israeli sniper. The Israel Defense Forces say they are not targeting civilians and blame Hamas for the attack from the civilian areas. During the war, the United Nations Office for Human Rights said there was “intense shooting by Israeli forces in densely populated areas, which led to illegal killings, including non -armed passers -by.”

The family was buried by a verse next to the school, and her 43 -year -old mother, Lina Dab, wrapped her in a blanket “to protect her from rain and sun” in the event of discomfort and exposure to the elements.

When the Israeli army seized the school, Lina fled in the south. She went with four other children – two daughters and two children – to reunite with her husband, who went early with the children of other couple. Lina had no choice but to leave her daughter as she was lying in the hope of returning and restoring the remains for a suitable burial as soon as peace came.

“The verse of a girl was very good, and everyone loved her. She loved to love everyone, her teachers and her studies, and she was very good at school. She wished well for everyone,” she says. When the ceasefire came, Lina asked the relatives who still live in the north to examine the grave of Aya. The news was destroyed.

“They told us that her head was in one place, her legs were in another, while her ribs were elsewhere. The person who went to visit her and sent the pictures,” she says.

“When I saw her, I could not understand how my daughter was removed from her grave, and how dogs ate her? I cannot control my nerves.”

Relatives collected the bones and soon Lina and her family travel north to carry the remains of Aya to a suitable grave. For Lina, there is an endless sadness, and an issue that has no answer – the same question that sits with many parents who lost children in Gaza. What could they do differently, the circumstances of the war were what they were?

“I couldn’t take her in terms of burial,” says Lina. Then she asks, “Where can I take it?”

With additional reports by maalak hassouneh, Alice Dweide, Adam Campbell.