An estimated 14,000 to 15,000 people are missing in Gaza with little prospect of being found either dead or alive because Israel has for years blocked the entry of the basic forensic tools required to identify human remains, while simultaneously dismantling the mechanisms through which families can trace Palestinians taken into its custody.
The finding emerged from a detailed investigation by Wired, which documented how Gaza had been turned into a “forensic desert” – a territory systematically denied the means to name its dead.
At the centre of the investigation was the family of Hassan Al-Qatta, a 16-year-old with autism who rode his bicycle out of his neighbourhood in al-Tuffah, east of Gaza City, one afternoon in 2024 and did not return. Nearly two years later, his parents do not know whether he is alive, dead or held in Israeli detention.
A boy is gone
Hassan Al-Qatta had autism. Before the war, his parents had organised their entire lives around his routines. When he was five, after a series of assessments, he was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Israel denied the family’s requests for treatment outside Gaza, his mother Abeer said, leaving her to learn therapy techniques.
The war that broke out after October 7, 2023, left the family displaced four times across 10 months. By April 2024, the family was surviving on a paste made from animal-feed seeds, pressed and called bread. Hassan stared at what he was given, knocked the table over and ran, his mother recalled.
A few days later, he took his bicycle, as he had done countless times before, looping the same familiar corners beneath their building. He did not come back. “It was as if the ground swallowed him,” Abeer told Wired.
A forensic desert
What makes Gaza’s crisis of the missing distinct and, as the evidence suggests, deliberate, is the near-total absence of the infrastructure required to identify the dead or locate the living.
Since imposing its blockade in 2007, Israel has classified the tools required for forensic identification – DNA analysers, genetic testing equipment, fingerprint and biometric scanners and toxicology instruments – as “dual use” items, potentially applicable to military purposes, and has barred them from entering Gaza. The consequences of this policy are now visible in every hospital in the territory.
Khalil Hamada, who has headed Gaza’s forensic medicine department at Al-Shifa Hospital since 2022, described to Wired the conditions in which his team works. Bodies arrive burned beyond recognition, torn apart by collapsed buildings, recovered from makeshift mass graves days or weeks after death.
Identification depends almost entirely on the naked eye. “Gaza has no biometric database – no fingerprints, no dental records, no DNA profiles,” Hamada said. “Even if we had machines, we would have nothing to compare against.”
His team photographs bodies, fills hand-written case forms and collects bone fragments and teeth for possible future testing. He estimated that only a few hundred unidentified bodies have been formally archived, which a fraction of the total dead.
“For years, we appealed to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for forensic equipment,” Hamada told Wired. “Nothing was allowed in.”
In January 2024, during a brief truce, an international NGO brought a forensic specialist from Oslo University to train Palestinian doctors in emergency mass-fatality documentation. Four doctors completed the specialisation. Gaza now has seven forensically trained doctors in total. They have no laboratories.
Detention maze
For those whose relatives may be alive in Israeli custody, the picture is no clearer.
Before October 2023, the ICRC had maintained access to Palestinians held by Israel. An Israeli nonprofit, HaMoked, operated a detainee-tracing hotline under an arrangement with the Israeli military. The system functioned unevenly, but it functioned.
After October 7, Israel declared it had no obligation to provide information about Gaza detainees. The ICRC was barred from visiting prisoners, a violation, the UN has said, of the Geneva Convention. HaMoked’s access was curtailed entirely.
A limited replacement mechanism was introduced in May 2024, after repeated petitions to Israel’s High Court. It requires families to submit a signed power of attorney, authorising a lawyer or human rights organisation to file a tracing request. This process difficult to complete amid communication blackouts and mass displacement. When the responses come, they offer only a brief formula of either confirming detention or noting there is “no indication” of arrest, without the information being elaborated.
Since the new system came into effect, HaMoked has traced 4,985 individuals. In 3,353 cases, Israel confirmed detention. In 1,632 cases, authorities said there was no information.
The gap between those two categories can be devastating. Wired documented the case of Ehab Diab, a 35-year-old man whose family watched Israeli soldiers handcuff him and drive him away in an armoured vehicle. Nine months later, when his family contacted human rights organisation Gisha to locate him, the military said there was “no indication of the arrest or detention” of Diab.
Nineteen months after his family watched him being taken, the state submitted a response in court. The chief of the southern command wrote to Diab that he was “being held as a corpse.”
The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has verified the deaths of 89 Palestinians – 88 men and one boy – in Israeli custody since October 7, 2023.
Bodies without names
Over October and November 2025, following a ceasefire, Israel returned 315 bodies to Gaza. They arrived without names and without paperwork. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 182 were buried unnamed. As many as 91 were identified, almost always because a family member recognised a scar, a tooth or the outline of a hand.
For Abeer Skaik and Ali Al-Qatta, the two years since Hassan disappeared have been filled with leads that go nowhere. A community leader once called to say Hassan’s name had been heard among people believed to be in Israeli detention. It went nowhere.
In March 2025, a relative relayed word that autistic minors were being held in Israeli custody and that Hassan was among them. The ICRC and human rights groups could find no record of Hassan.
On January 19, eight detainees were released to a hospital in Deir al-Balah, including a 16-year-old boy. Ali ran to the boy’s family, showed him Hassan’s photograph. Nothing came of it. Days ago, a body was found on al-Rashid Street. A neighbour called Ali. He went. It was an older man with a beard. It was not Hassan.
The couple remain in their damaged home in northern Gaza, the one place that Hassan might remember and the one place he might find his way back to. Relatives have urged them to leave, but they have refused.Somewhere on Abeer’s phone there is a voice message Hassan sent his special-needs teacher in Khan Younis in the days before he disappeared. His voice was thin. “I’m hungry. Make me food,” he said. His mother believes he rode his bicycle south towards Khan Younis, towards the teacher, in hope of a meal.
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