These Palestinians disappeared after encounters with Israeli troops in Gaza

Sitting next to her son Wael, left, Reem Ajour shows a picture of her daughter, Masaa, and her husband, Talal, on her cellphone in a camp outside Zuweida, Gaza Strip, Nov. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

By WAFAA SHURAFA, SARAH EL DEEB and JULIA FRANKEL Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Reem Ajour says she last saw her husband and then 4-year-old daughter in March, when Israeli soldiers raided a family home in northern Gaza. She is haunted by those chaotic last moments, when the soldiers ordered her to go – to leave behind Talal and Masaa, both wounded.

Eight months later, the 23-year-old mother still has no answers about their fate. The military says it does not have them. Troops leveled the house where they were staying soon after the raid.

“I am living and dead at the same time,” she said, breaking down in sobs.

Ajour is one of dozens of Palestinians that an Israeli legal group, Hamoked, is helping in their search for family members who went missing after being separated by Israeli soldiers during raids and arrests in the Gaza Strip.

Their cases — a fraction of the estimated thousands who have gone missing during the 14-month-long war — highlight a lack of accountability in how the Israeli military deals with Palestinians during ground operations in Gaza, Hamoked says.

Throughout the war, the military has conducted what amounts to a mass sifting of the Palestinian population as it raids homes and shelters and sends people through checkpoints. Troops round up and detain men, from dozens to several hundreds at a time, searching for any they suspect of Hamas ties, while forcing their families away, toward other parts of Gaza. The result is families split apart, often amid the chaos of fighting.

But the military has not made clear how it keeps track of everyone it separates, arrests or detains. Even if troops transfer Palestinians to military detention inside Israel, they can hold them incommunicado for more than two months — their whereabouts unknown to families or lawyers, according to rights groups.

When people vanish, it’s nearly impossible to know what happened, Hamoked says.

“We’ve never had a situation of mass forced disappearance from Gaza, with no information provided for weeks and weeks to families,” said Jessica Montell, the director of Hamoked. Israel’s High Court of Justice has refused to intervene to get answers, despite Hamoked’s petitions, she said.

Asked by The Associated Press about the cases of Ajour and two other families it interviewed, the Israeli military declined comment.

4-year-old Masaa Ajour was shot, then separated from her mother

The Ajours were sheltering at a home in Gaza City that belonged to Talal’s family after being displaced from their own house earlier in the war. Israeli troops raided the home on March 24, opening fire as they burst in, Ajour said.

Ajour, who was three months pregnant, was shot in the stomach. Talal was wounded in his leg, bleeding heavily. Masaa lay passed out, shot in the shoulder – though Ajour said she saw her still breathing.

As one soldier bandaged the little girl’s wound, another pointed his gun in Ajour’s face and told her to head out of Gaza City.

She said she pleaded that she couldn’t leave Masaa and Talal, but the soldier screamed: “Go south!”

With no choice, Ajour collected her younger son and went down to the street. “It was all in a blink of an eye. It was all so fast,” she said. Still bleeding, she walked for two and a half hours, clutching her son.

When they reached a hospital in central Gaza, doctors treated her stomach wound and found her fetus’ pulse. Weeks later, doctors found the pulse had gone. She miscarried.

Ajour said that several weeks later, a Palestinian released from a prison in southern Israel told her family he had heard her husband’s name called out over a loudspeaker among a list of detainees.

The rumor has kept her hope alive, but the military told Hamoked it had no record of Masaa or Talal being detained.

Another possibility is that they died on the scene, but no one has been able to search the rubble of the family’s building to determine if any bodies are there.

The storming of their building came as Israeli forces were battling Hamas fighters in surrounding streets while raiding nearby Shifa Hospital, where it claimed the militants were based. Troops cleared families out of nearby homes and often then destroyed or set the buildings ablaze, according to witnesses at the time.

The military itself may not know what happened to Ajour’s husband and daughter, said Montell of Hamoked.

“That illustrates a broader problem,” she said.

Ajour and her son now shelter in a tent camp outside the central Gaza town of Zuweida.

Masaa, she said, “was my first joy” — with blond hair and olive-colored eyes, a face “white like the moon.”

Masaa’s fifth birthday was in July, Ajour said, sobbing. “She turned five while she is not with me.”

Does the military document what troops do in Gaza?

Under a wartime revision to Israeli law, Palestinians from Gaza taken to military detention in Israel can be held for over two months without access to the outside world.

Israel says the law is necessary to handle the unprecedented number of detainees as it seeks to destroy Hamas following the Oct. 7 2023, attack on Israel that killed 1,200 and took around 250 people hostage inside Gaza. The military has transferred some 1,770 of its Gaza detainees to civilian prisons, according to rights groups, but it has not revealed the number still in its detention.

Milena Ansari, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said Israel is obligated under international law to document what happens during every home raid and detention. But the military is not transparent about the information it collects on detainees or on how many it is holding, she said.

Hamoked has asked the military for the whereabouts of 900 missing Palestinians. The military confirmed around 500 of them were detained in Israel. It said it had no record of detaining the other 400.

The group petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice seeking answers in 52 cases, including that of Masaa and two other children, where witnesses testified that the missing were handled by troops before their disappearances.

“The judges just dismiss the cases, without even inquiring what measures might be necessary to prevent such cases in the future,” said Montell.

A court spokesperson said it often asks the military to provide additional information but isn’t authorized to investigate if the military says it is not detaining them.

In the cases of three missing adult Palestinians presented by Hamoked, the military first claimed it was not holding them, then found records of them being detained after being pressed by Hamoked to double-check.

In another case, military police discovered that two Palestinians they had initially denied holding — a father and his adult son — had died in Israeli custody. The U.N. Human Rights Office says at least 53 Palestinians are known to have died in Israeli detention during the war.

Ailing with cancer, Mahmoud Alghrabli disappeared after raid

The last time the Alghrabli family saw their 76-year-old patriarch, Mahmoud Alghrabli, was when Israeli troops stormed their district in Khan Younis on Feb. 4. The soldiers ordered residents out of the area. The Alghrablis had to carry Mahmoud, suffering from cancer, out of their building on a chair, his son Ahmed Algharbli told the AP.

After detaining some men, the soldiers ordered the rest to leave. Mahmoud Alghrabli made it to a sand mound near the house. Ahmed Algharbli said his brother went to help the father, but soldiers shouted at him to leave.

“He left our father by force, or he would have been shot,” he said.

The family returned a month later. There was no trace of Mahmoud. Ahmed Algharbli said he “walked meter by meter” searching for traces, finding bones but not knowing whose they were. He keeps them wrapped in a piece of cloth at home.

Hamoked was told by the military there was no indication of him in Israeli detention.

“By God, I don’t sleep at night,” said Mahmoud’s wife, Sabah Abdul-Salam. Whether he was arrested or killed, she said, “let us know, we will rest.”

Mahmoud Almoqayed vanished while searching for his family

The only traces left of another missing man, 77-year-old Mahmoud Almoqayed, are his torn shirt and pants with his ID in the pocket. They were found in the dirt near the school where he and his family were sheltering when it was raided by Israeli troops on May 23 in the northern town of Beit Lahiya.

The soldiers released Almoqayed and sent him and other men to another shelter, said his son, Rani Almoqayed, a doctor working in Saudi Arabia who pieced together the account from witnesses and family members.

Once at the second shelter, the elderly Almoqayed immediately turned back, determined to find his wife and grandchildren left behind at the school, witnesses told his son. It was dark, well after 1 a.m., and troops were all around the area. Almoqayed was never seen by his family again.

Weeks later, his family found his abandoned clothes. They also found skulls and body parts nearby, Rani Almoqayed said.

The military police told Hamoked it had no indication Almoqayed was detained.

Rani Almoqayed believes it’s possible his father was killed and Israeli troops took the body. Since December 2023, the military has returned at least 318 bodies and a sack of body parts to Gaza after seizing them to search for hostages, a senior U.N. official in Gaza told the AP, speaking anonymously to discuss confidential matters.

The bodies, with no identification and often decomposed, are buried in anonymous mass graves.

The family had Mahmoud Almoqayed declared officially dead, his son said.

“But the doubt will not stop and one’s heart won’t ease unless they see the body.”

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El Deeb reported from Beirut, and Frankel from Jerusalem.