Listen here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
In April 2024, a 16-year-old boy named Hassan Al-Qatta rode his bicycle out of his neighborhood in Gaza and never came back. He is not confirmed dead. He is not confirmed alive. He has simply disappeared. Hassan is one of an estimated 9,000 to 15,000 people missing in Gaza. Journalist Mahmoud Mushtaha spent eight months reporting on what that number actually means.
In this episode, we speak with Mushtaha about his investigation into Gaza’s missing, produced by the Palestine Reporting Lab, a project of Just Vision. The investigation was published last month in partnership with WIRED and published in Arabic on Raseef22.
The missing are not only the dead. They include people taken during military raids, last seen at checkpoints or aid distribution sites, disappeared into detention, or erased by extreme heat that leaves no recoverable remains.
Mushtaha argues that this uncertainty is not an unavoidable consequence of war — it is the result of documented, deliberate decisions: restrictions on forensic equipment entering Gaza, the Red Cross being barred from visiting prisoners, and the withholding of information about those in Israeli custody.
For families of the missing, the consequences extend far beyond grief. Without a body, without a death certificate, without any official record, they are frozen out of bank accounts and inheritance and deprived of basic legal rights. They cannot be formally recognized as widows or orphans. They cannot fully mourn what had not been confirmed lost.
We also speak with Mushtaha about what eight months of this reporting did to him — and about what it means to have left Gaza physically while remaining, as he has written for +972 Magazine, emotionally trapped in the war.
Additional reading:
