Hassan Took a Bike Ride. Now He's One of the Thousands Missing in Gaza | WIRED

Overview

Hassan Took a Bike Ride. Now He's One of the Thousands Missing in Gaza

In the early morning dark, Abeer Skaik turned to her husband, Ali Al-Qatta, and said that today would be the day they would find their son. Ali nodded in silence, and she handed him the stack of flyers. Each bore a photograph of 16-year-old Hassan smiling widely, his shoulders loose, wearing a plain red T-shirt. He is looking directly at the camera, unguarded. On top of the page, in large letters, Abeer had written a single word in bold red ink: Munashada!—an appeal.

Details

Abeer watched as Ali stepped into a car with a few close friends and drove away. They started the 30-kilometer trip south, from al-Tuffah, east of Gaza City, to the European Hospital in Khan Younis. They had heard that a group of people detained by Israel, including children, would be released there.

The gate was already crowded. Families stood shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in blankets against the cold, clutching photographs and ID cards. Ali distributed the flyers among his friends. When the buses of released detainees arrived, he and the others moved slowly through the narrow gaps between clusters of people. Some of those who had just been released were being pulled into embraces. Ali waited at the edge of each reunion. “Have you seen my son?” he asked. One after another, people shook their heads. The crowds thinned. It was 2 am by the time Ali returned. Abeer watched her husband place the photographs on the table. They stood and looked at each other without speaking, Ali’s eyes distant as if he was entering someone else’s house. It had been 10 months since they had last been with their son.

Before the October 7 attacks, before a UN commission and a host of Palestinian and international rights groups determined that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, Abeer’s life had been organized around Hassan’s routines. He woke at the same hour every morning, ate the same foods in the same order, needed the house cleaned in a specific way—the floor washed, the table wiped after every meal. When he was 11 months old, Hassan’s parents saw that he wasn’t able to crawl or sit and that he didn’t babble the way his sister had at that age. After a long series of medical assessments, Hassan, then 5, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Abeer says Israel had denied the family’s request to obtain treatment for Hassan outside Gaza. So Abeer started teaching herself therapy techniques, how to build behavioral routines, how to manage his sensory overload. Together, she and her husband, Ali, structured Hassan’s days around safety and repetition, and they learned how to fill their house with joy. Hassan laughed when his father splashed him in the bath just the way he demanded, showed an endless appetite for turning the pages of magazines and poring through photos in restaurant menus, loved to sit on soft pillows with his mother. “I used to say I had four eyes,” Abeer says. “Mine and his. Mine never slept.”

The bombs were the first thing to break Hassan. Every explosion made the 16-year-old press a shaking hand to his chest and whisper, “Mama, my heart is scared.” Displacement fractured him again. He screamed each of the four times they had to evacuate. “Why am I leaving my home? I don’t want to leave home. I want my bed,” he said. Hassan, who could not tolerate feeling unwashed even for a few hours, went 10 full days without showering. One day while they were sheltering at a relative’s home, he carried a small bottle of water, followed his mother around, and begged for a shower.

By April 2024, scarcity had entered every part of daily life. Starvation deepened as Israel cut off food supplies. Clean water was hard to find. Abeer lost about 40 pounds. Days before Hassan disappeared, he snapped at his mother over what little food remained—only a dry concoction they called bread, made of mixed seeds that were once sold as animal feed, which left it with a repulsive smell. He did not understand why there was no real bread, no rice, no milk, no meat. Hassan stared at what he’d been given, pushed it away, and shouted, “What are you feeding me?” In a moment of pure overwhelm, he knocked the table on its side and ran from the house.

Hassan’s confusion grew, until finally, one afternoon, he took his bicycle and pushed it through the doorway. He had learned to ride long before the war, practicing again and again along the same short stretch of street beneath their building. As he grew older, the bicycle became part of his routine. Neighbors were used to seeing him, looping the same corners, stopping in the same places, moving through the neighborhood in a way that felt safe and familiar to him.

After Hassan rode away, Abeer expected him back within minutes, as usual. But then 10 minutes passed, and 30. The light began to fade as evening approached. Ali left to search the nearby streets. Abeer remained inside, her four other children in the home, moving between the doorway and the window, her phone in her hand calling neighbors and relatives. Each time footsteps passed outside, she jumped up to look.

In a video before his disappearance, Hassan rides his bike around their neighborhood.

By night, there was no electricity, no light, and the street emptied in anticipation of heavy bombardment. Neighbors told Abeer they had not seen Hassan. No one remembered a boy riding past. After dark, her husband returned briefly, then went out again, following what remained of the routes Hassan always took—the narrow alley beside the building, the back street that avoided traffic and noise. Before the war, Hassan could move through Gaza’s streets without hesitation. He had carried the city in his head—the map that led him to relatives’ homes, to small shops, to familiar cafés, to the corners and shortcuts that anchored his routine. But these were no longer the streets he knew. Entire neighborhoods had been leveled. Buildings had fallen into the road. And Gaza had been split in two by an Israeli checkpoint on al-Rashid Street, intersecting with a militarized line dividing north and south.

“It was as if the ground swallowed him,” Abeer says.

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What followed was less an investigation than a desperate, repetitive circuit—similar to the ones that thousands of Gazan families now move through. It is a shared condition, this radical uncertainty, in which the fate of missing people can seldom be resolved by any accessible authority. Some of Gaza’s missing were taken from their homes during military raids, others were last seen at checkpoints or approaching aid distribution sites, or essentially taken to be used as human shields by Israeli forces (a practice that the Israel Defense Forces says it expressly prohibits). Some have vanished into informal Israeli detention sites that yield almost no information on who is alive, dead, or in custody. Others have been effectively “evaporated” by extreme-heat munitions, leaving no recoverable bodies. Still others were buried immediately by neighbors to keep them from the dogs, without any record. Many never reach a morgue, never pass through a hospital register. Their names appear on no casualty lists, prison databases, or death registries. They are simply gone.

This is not some unavoidable consequence of war. In most contemporary conflicts, unidentified bodies are eventually linked to families through forensic identification systems. This process can take years and is often incomplete, but global systems exist to import or access the necessary technologies. Gaza, though, has been a kind of forensic desert for years now. It is a territory that has been systematically denied the tools required to name its dead.

When Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza beginning in 2007, it soon placed those tools—for toxicology testing, genetic analysis, DNA testing, and even fingerprint and biometric scanners—on a list of “dual use” items, which the government says can also be used for military purposes. There is little transparency in this realm. An official list of blocked goods used to be available online, but archived versions have not been updated since 2020, and it’s been subject to change. In addition to specific items, Israel bars whole categories of things, like “communications equipment". Now, in this time of unparalleled death, the unidentified dead cannot be linked through DNA to the living. The Israeli government has also hobbled the mechanisms once meant to allow families to identify relatives held in detention, and has barred the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from accessing prisoners, in violation of the Geneva Convention. Meanwhile, entire swaths of Gaza—where countless bodies sit under the rubble or in mass graves—are controlled by Israel and are off-limits for Palestinian travel. Where Gazan authorities have interred the dead, bodies are often buried before proper biological samples have been taken, sometimes without any real records at all.

In all this chaos, amid the collapse of official documentation systems, no -single institution can authoritatively say how many people are missing in Gaza. The Gaza Health Ministry places its estimate at more than 9,500. The Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared says its field estimates indicate around 9,000. The ICRC says it has received approximately 11,500 tracing requests for missing people in Gaza and that around half of those cases remain unresolved. Each of these organizations emphasize that their figures may be incomplete. In January, the Institute for Social and Economic Progress, a Palestinian research group, conducted an exclusive poll across Gaza to assess the crisis of the missing. Using the results, ISEP’s best estimate is that there could be 14,000 to 15,000 people still missing in Gaza out of a total population of around 2 million.

For the loved ones of the missing, this state of mass irresolution can amount to a lived experience of profound, frenetic, risky restlessness. Even with daily bombings, Abeer and her husband move through rubble, shelters, hospitals, and ruins. They have pushed through crowds of displaced families, questioning anyone who might have seen a teenage boy on a bicycle. They have contacted everyone they can. “We searched for him everywhere,” Abeer says. “We posted on social media and sent his photo to social media influencers. We told the news channels. We distributed posters.” They have followed every rumor, every faint possibility, looking for any witnesses. “But nothing,” Abeer says. “There is no trace of him.”

In Ali and Abeer’s children’s room, a box of Hassan’s belongings.

Nearly two years after Hassan disappeared, Abeer has received no official determination of his fate. Hassan is not confirmed dead. He is not confirmed alive. He is not officially acknowledged as detained. He exists only in fragments: a photograph, an old note, the memory of a bicycle disappearing down the street. His name surfaces intermittently through informal channels, then vanishes again. Abeer does not describe grief any more. She describes a kind of purgatory. “This process destroys your mind,” she says. “It is paralysis.”

Inside the morgue refrigerator at Al-Shifa Hospital.

Days after Hassan disappeared, his father, Ali, went to search for him at Al-Shifa hospital. Families crowded the entrances, waiting their turn to look for loved ones. The corridors were lined with bodies wrapped in blankets or plastic. Refrigerators were full. Some corpses lay in ice-cream freezers. The air was heavy with disinfectant and decay; the floors slick with water, blood, and residue from hurried washings.

Some searchers cried. Others stood rigid, scanning rows of bodies in silence. There was no privacy, no order—only urgency. When staff were overwhelmed, men lifted coverings themselves, exposing limbs, torsos, faces burned or crushed beyond recognition. Families searched for birthmarks, scars, teeth, fragments of clothing. Some were pulled away mid-glance by relatives who decided they should not see more.

Ali moved through the space. He did not linger. He looked, registered what he could, and moved on. He went home and broke down for the first time since he’d been married. “The mountain became two mountains upon me,” says Abeer. “I was afraid to cry in front of Ali, afraid he would collapse in my arms—and that I would lose both my son and his father.”

The hospital that undid Ali is the workplace where Khalil Hamada spends his days. Hamada, 53, has headed Gaza’s forensic medicine department out of Al-Shifa Hospital since 2022. When I first spoke to him, he was living in a tent after being displaced from his home in the Al-Jalaa neighborhood, west of Gaza City. “My heart collapses every day,” he told me when we talked in February. “People come to us looking for their loved ones. Thousands of families want only one thing—to bury with dignity, to bury a father, a mother, a brother, to have a name and a place to grieve. And I cannot help them.”

Hamada sits outside of the bombed Al-Shifa Hospital.

War has long forced societies to invent ways of naming the dead. Modern forensic identification itself grew out of conflict: one of its earliest recorded uses dates to 1776, when Paul Revere identified a fallen soldier by the distinctive false teeth he had made for him. In the wars that followed, the same basic question—who is this person?—drove the steady expansion of forensic science, from dental records and fingerprints to DNA and biometric databases.

In Gaza, that historical progress has been denied. Bodies come to Hamada in conditions that would make even scientific analysis difficult—burned beyond recognition, torn apart by collapsing buildings, recovered after days or weeks in makeshift and mass graves, long after visual certainty had disappeared. But in Gaza, identification still depends almost entirely on what the eye can recognize.

In a functioning system, Hamada explained, when other, easier methods fail, biological samples would be processed using genetic analyzers and comparison software, then matched against a database of reference samples from families, fingerprint and dental records, and national civil registries. This is the standard procedure described by the International Commission on Missing Persons. Each conflict, from Guatemala to Ukraine and beyond, has its own unique circumstances when it comes to the use of forensic technology. Syria, for instance, only recently resumed DNA analysis to identify bodies from its decade-plus civil war because sanctions previously barred it from importing the technology. But Israel, for decades, has effectively prevented the Ministry of Health in Gaza from establishing a forensic lab, classifying nearly all of the tools necessary to do so as potentially dangerous.

“For years, we appealed to the World Health Organization and the International Committee of the Red Cross for forensic equipment,” Hamada said. “Nothing was allowed in.”

The team is preserving DNA material in hopes of future testing.

In January 2024, during a brief truce, an international NGO brought a forensic specialist from Oslo University to Gaza. That expert trained 10 Palestinian doctors in emergency mass-fatality documentation and evidence—preservation techniques adapted to extreme low-resource conditions. The program leaders ultimately chose four to continue in the specialization, bringing the number of forensically trained doctors in Gaza to seven. But they still have no laboratories. “We have doctors, but we don’t have machines,” Hamada says. “We photograph and record whatever we can. But in most cases, it is not enough.”

In the absence of proper equipment, Hamada’s team conducts a rudimentary postmortem review—consisting of a snapshot with a digital camera, a hand-filled form recording a case number and date, an estimated age and height when possible, and notes on any visible injuries, scars, surgical marks, dental features, and hair, along with an inventory of clothing and a list of personal belongings. During the archiving process, which includes making physical binders as well as electronic files, the team also collects biological samples—such as teeth or bone fragments—so they can be preserved, since there are not enough morgues to store the bodies.

Despite the efforts of Hamada and his colleagues, he estimates that only a few hundred unidentified bodies have been formally archived, a tiny fraction of the total. And under current conditions, even these cases may lead nowhere. “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.”

During the war, a new stopgap system for Gazan burials has emerged. A committee composed of representatives from the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the Palestinian Civil Defense authorizes the burial of remains in numbered graves, digitally mapped in accordance with international guidelines and with some assistance from ICRC officials. This is so that, in the future, if anyone recognizes a personal belonging, authorities will know where the body is buried. If DNA testing materials are later allowed into Gaza, they will be able to conduct proper forensic testing. “We keep every record,” Hamada said. “Because maybe, when the war ends and the laboratories return, someone will recognize their loved one.”

International law, says Mayy El Sheikh, a spokesman from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, is clear on the subject of identification. “Israel has an obligation to take all feasible measures to account for missing persons and to provide families with any available information on the fate and whereabouts of missing relatives,” she says.

“The combined effect of Israel’s obstruction of the entry of necessary equipment and trained personnel, its failure to recover human remains and to treat them with respect and dignity, the continued withholding of bodies, and its practice of enforced disappearance and incommunicado detention is foreseeable and preventable: agony for thousands of Palestinian families deprived of their right to learn the fates of their loved ones and their right to bury their dead in accordance with their customs and beliefs,” says El Sheikh. “It is cruel, inhumane, and flies in the face of international law.”

In response to a detailed list of questions, the Israeli military says it “has operated and continues to operate in accordance with international law throughout the conflict, taking feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians and civilian property,” and referred WIRED to the Israeli Prison Services for comment on detentions. The Prison Services did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the course of October and November 2025, Israel returned 315 bodies to Gaza after a ceasefire. They arrived without names or paperwork—only remains. “The bodies arrive void of information,” says Hamada. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 182 of these bodies were buried unnamed. Ultimately, 91 were identified, almost always because relatives recognized a scar, a tooth, or the outline of a hand.

Out in the streets, too, or in the ruins of bombed buildings, survivors identify scattered remains through a piece of clothing, a ring, the look of someone’s hair.

This is how I remember my own experience. On November 21, 2023, a single strike on a building in Shuja’iyya, a neighborhood east of Gaza City, killed more than 70 people, most of them distant relatives of mine. What remained were not bodies but fragments—burned, crushed, and mixed beyond recognition. We laid the remains out in rows and moved between them slowly, making decisions no family should have to make. When visual identification failed, we relied on context: Who had been inside the house, who had not been seen since the explosion, who was known to be in which room. When even that was insufficient, we laid blankets out on the ground and decided that each one would represent a household. If a family of five was unaccounted for, we placed the remains of what we guessed could be five people on top of one blanket. In that way, for instance, we accounted for a family of two parents and their three children.

Family after family in Gaza has done the same. In other cases, dealing intimately with the dead simply falls to whoever is nearby. Mohammed Shehta Dremly, 34, recalls sheltering for days with his family and dozens of others in close quarters as bombs rained down around him. On the seventh night, flares lit the sky, drones hovered overhead, and smoke bombs filled the street. A shell hit their building; another struck the house next door, where newly displaced families were sheltering. Around evening prayer time, they heard a strike, followed by screams. No one could go outside. Windows shattered, doors splintered. “I didn’t think we would see the morning,” he said.

At dawn, Dremly, his uncle, and a neighbor went outside. The house next door had collapsed. More than 15 people inside had been killed. The wounded were evacuated by donkey cart, because no ambulance could reach the site. As Dremly walked through the rubble, he encountered body parts scattered across the road.

“I found a man’s leg, separated from the body,” he said. “Then a head. Then a thigh. Then an arm.”

There were no rescuers, no relatives, no officials. The three men decided to bury the remains so dogs would not eat them. Dremly dug a pit for nearly an hour. The men collected fragments from at least three bodies—mixed and unidentifiable. As they worked, an Israeli drone hovered overhead. He lifted part of a leg toward it, hoping to show what they were doing, afraid they would be shot. The three men covered the pit and fled as shelling resumed. When Dremly returned days later, dogs had dug up the grave. He buried the remains again. He still doesn’t know who they were.

Israel’s efforts to identify its own dead are robust. In late January of this year, Israeli forces excavated dozens of Palestinian bodies from the Shuja’iyya neighborhood and transferred them to laboratories in Israel in an attempt to identify a single Israeli hostage, Ran Gvili, whom Hamas said it had been unable to return. For Hamada, watching this unfold was unbearable. “The world is cruel. It is shameless,” he says, his speech suddenly accelerating. “It mourns the body of one soldier, while thousands of us—including bodies of children, of women …” He pauses, struggles to finish the thought, then simply repeats: “Thousands of us.”

Binders filled with details of bodies in Hamada's office.

On January 7, 2024, a 31-year-old woman named Bisan Fadl Fayyad was reported missing in Deir al-Balah after she left their home and did not return. The next day, her family received a call from Gaza’s Nasser Hospital saying that authorities there had a body they believed to be Bisan’s.

At the hospital, the family was presented with three badly burned parts. “I could not recognize the body,” her father told journalists. Along with the remains, the hospital also gave them Bisan’s damaged ID, which they were told had been found alongside the remains. The family buried the remains and began mourning.

Then, over a year later, on August 17, 2025, Bisan’s brother, Mohammed Fayyad, posted on social media saying that the family had received reports that his sister was alive and being held in Israeli custody. A flurry of press coverage followed, and the family waited, expecting to see her again. The October 2025 ceasefire was declared. One group of prisoners was released, then another. But Bisan was not among them. The family soon stopped speaking publicly about her case. If Bisan was being held in detention, they told me, they feared that media attention could harm her.

On January 18, her brother, Anan Fayyad, posted again. He said he no longer knew what was true. “If she was martyred, may God have mercy on her,” he wrote on Facebook. “If she is in detention, I ask God to bring her back to us soon.”

Bisan’s family cannot know for sure whether the body they buried two years ago was indeed hers. But neither could they be certain that the silence about her detention meant much of anything. Getting information on Palestinians in Israeli custody has always been difficult. But since October 7, the system for finding Gazan detainees has become a maddening labyrinth that leaves families hanging on to shards of information from those who have been released.

For decades before the war, the ICRC has maintained access to Palestinians held by Israel, and an Israeli nonprofit called Ha Moked operated a detainee-tracing hotline under an arrangement with the Israeli military. That system functioned unevenly but predictably: Ha Moked could submit names and receive a confirmation of detention and a location. Cases from Gaza were relatively rare. The systems collapsed entirely in October 2023, when Israel argued it had no obligation to provide any information about Gaza detainees. The ICRC was entirely prohibited from visiting prisoners, and the access Ha Moked used to have was restricted. In the months and years that followed, thousands of Palestinians have been taken into Israeli custody—their fates often unknown.

The ICRC is still denied access. A new, limited tracing mechanism that Ha Moked can use was introduced in May 2024, after repeated High Court petitions. It requires families to send a signed power of attorney authorizing a lawyer or human rights organization to file a tracing request—a difficult task amid communication blackouts, displacement, and limited phone and internet access in Gaza.

Responses have been reduced to a brief formula—either confirming detention or stating there is “no indication” of an arrest—without explanation or supporting information. Since this new system was introduced, Ha Moked has traced 4,985 individuals. In 3,353 cases, Israel confirmed the person was detained. In 1,632 cases, authorities said there was no information.

Sometimes, people suddenly reemerge alive from Israeli custody after months of secret detention. In one case, in late 2023, Israeli soldiers raided the home where a 35-year-old man named Ehab Diab was sheltering with his family. The family watched as Diab was handcuffed, placed in an armored military vehicle, and driven off. Nine months after he disappeared, the family contacted an Israeli human rights organization called Gisha, which submitted a formal inquiry to Israel’s Military Police asking where Diab was being held in order to arrange a lawyer’s visit. Less than an hour later, the military replied: There was “no indication of the arrest or detention” of Diab—“no indication” of the abduction Diab’s family had witnessed with their own eyes. More months, more paperwork, more stonewalling. Then, on July 2, 2025—19 months after the arrest—the state submitted a response in court. Diab, wrote the chief of the southern command, Lt. Col. Rabbi David Haimov, was “being held as a corpse.”

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has verified the deaths of 89 Palestinians—88 men and one boy—in Israeli custody since October 7, 2023. (Physicians for Human Rights has put the number at 94 and says that its figure is likely an undercount.) Israeli authorities have reported additional deaths without sufficient detail for independent verification, the OHCHR says. The office also documented at least five cases in which Palestinians died in custody shortly after being shot by Israeli forces. The Israeli military says that an “investigation is conducted for each death of a detainee by the military police.”

Abeer already knew, when her son went missing, that Israeli forces had swept up thousands of Gazans, including children, into detention. In shelters and relatives’ homes, she heard stories like those of Diab. She heard rumors about children who had been taken and then released months later. They were children of Hassan’s age.

It took nearly a year after Hassan disappeared for the first specific lead to reach Abeer. A call came from a local community leader who told the family he had heard Hassan’s name mentioned among people believed to be alive in Israeli detention. The tip went nowhere.

Abeer pulled on every thread until she reached its end. To a host of offices and organizations, she sent the same details: Hassan’s full name, date of birth, identity number, the neighborhood he left from, and the day he disappeared. The replies she received were short and procedural. Rumors came from acquaintances and people claiming to have information. One said he was detained. Another that he was dead. Another that he was under the rubble, or in the south. “They tell you, ‘Forget him, imagine he’s been killed,’” Abeer says.

In their kitchen, a flyer that Abeer and Ali made to help locate Hassan.

Hope returned through the same informal channels. In March 2025, a distant relative told the family she’d heard that there were autistic minors in Israeli detention—and that Hassan was among them, alive. A relative filmed the moment Abeer’s brother-in-law called with this news. In the video, Abeer is seen cooking when she answers the phone. Her voice rises over the sizzle of the stove. “What’s happening? What’s happening? Please, don’t make me nervous,” she says, the tongs in her hand hanging in midair as she appears to freeze. Abeer then suddenly collapses on the kitchen floor. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she cries, before a relative rushes to hold her.

Abeer contacted the ICRC and human rights groups to see if they could confirm the tip. But nobody had any record of Hassan.

What this uncertainty denies Abeer, and so many others—orphans with missing parents, wives without husbands, fathers taking care of kids without mothers—isn’t just peace of mind. Without documentation, aid systems cannot function and life remains suspended. Under the Gazan Ministry of Health’s system, a death cannot be registered without a body unless two witnesses testify that they saw the body or the burial. The rule assumes functioning hospitals, registries, and documentation.

In an effort to break the impasse, last November, authorities in Gaza proposed allowing death certificates to be issued for a person who has been missing for more than six months after the October 2025 ceasefire, even without an identified body. The idea was to help thousands unlock inheritance, guardianship, and access to assistance. But the judicial authority in Ramallah immediately rejected it, reaffirming that, by law, a declaration of death may be issued only after four years of disappearance. Such a discrepancy would have meant the same person could end up listed as dead in one system and alive in another.

Abeer and Ali are frozen. In the two years since their son vanished, the world around them has turned upside down. Most of the buildings in their area were bombed, and almost everyone they knew fled. Their relatives begged them to leave the north of Gaza. But Abeer and Ali did not. They went back to their damaged home, because it is the one place Hassan might know to return to, the one place he might know the way back to. Even before Hassan went missing, Abeer and Ali resisted moving south when relatives began evacuating, because new places unsettled him and disrupted the routines and rhythms Hassan had depended on. They did not want to push him far from the streets he knew.

“We saw death many times,” Abeer says. “The tanks arrived in our street.” But her resolve was firm. “If you want me to leave this city,” she says, “bring me my son first. Put him in my hands, and I will go.”

What keeps Abeer awake some nights is imagining what detention would do to Hassan. “I can’t bear it,” she says. “My son has never been hit. Never. If soldiers are torturing him, how can I live? I imagine them beating him, and I lose control. I can’t imagine anyone raising a hand against him.” On other nights she is kept up by the thought that he is dead. A few weeks ago, a body was found on al-Rashid Street. A neighbor called Ali and asked him to come. He went. The body was that of an older man. He had a beard. It could not have been Hassan.

Ali is exhausted by the cycle. “My husband is more realistic than I am,” Abeer says. “He always tells me, ‘Even if they say Hassan is alive, they’ll play with our hearts.’ And I know he’s right. Every time we think there is news, they twist it, delay it, keep us waiting. It feels like they want to burn our nerves—to keep us living between hope and despair.”

The strain has opened fissures between them. Abeer reacts immediately. She follows every lead, even when she already expects it to evaporate. Ali hesitates. He asks for details before letting someone describe a body. Abeer believes her husband has stopped believing their son is alive. “They never let anyone come back from there,” he has said. Yet Ali searches anyway—already disappointed, already trying to harden himself. He even walks to the edge of Israel’s so-called “yellow line” buffer zone, where people warn him he could be shot if he goes any further. When he tells Abeer a lead has failed, she feels something taken from her. When she asks him to wait for confirmation, he hears only the prolongation of pain. They are negotiating how much hope their family can still afford.

On January 19, 2026, eight detainees were released to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah. One of them was a 16-year-old child. Ali and Abeer found the name of the boy’s family on social media, and Ali ran straight to the family, to ask the released teenager if he had seen Hassan. He showed the boy Hassan’s photo. Like every other time, nothing came of it. Another lead turned to sand. “We search through piles of bones and teeth. We can barely recognize any facial features,” Abeer says. “We find this person’s boot, that person’s belt. This is what we have to look through. It is as if we’re searching the air itself.”

In Ali and Abeer’s children’s room, a box of Hassan’s belongings.

Abeer and Ali walk in their neighborhood, where they stay in hopes that Hassan will come home.

On the day Hassan disappeared, he was wearing the top of a tracksuit. Abeer still keeps the trousers, she says—the last thread still tethering her to her son that fateful day. Two years ago, a few days after her son vanished, Abeer discovered a voice message on her phone that Hassan had sent his teacher in Khan Younis. The teacher had spent years helping him with speech and social skills, and he was deeply attached to her. In the message, his voice is thin. “I’m hungry,” he says. “Make me food.” Hassan had sent the note without Abeer knowing, when he heard that there was food to the south where the teacher lived. She thinks now that Hassan left their home to go to the teacher, in hopes of a meal. Abeer cannot listen to the voice memo. She cannot delete it.

This article was produced in partnership with the Palestine Reporting Lab, a project of Just Vision.

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Key Takeaways

Hassan Took a Bike Ride
In the early morning dark, Abeer Skaik turned to her husband, Ali Al-Qatta, and said that today would be the day they would find their son
Abeer watched as Ali stepped into a car with a few close friends and drove away
The gate was already crowded
Before the October 7 attacks, before a UN commission and a host of Palestinian and international rights groups determined that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, Abeer’s life had been organized around Hassan’s routines