Mohammed Naim al-Nimnim was carrying his five-year-old son Abdul Rahman when his family reached an Israeli military checkpoint on Salah al-Din Road in eastern Gaza.
The family had fled the northern areas under bombardment and was heading south after spending weeks moving between shelters.
When they reached the inspection point in mid-November 2023, an Israeli soldier called Mohammed by name. He put down the bags, lowered his child to the ground and approached the soldiers with his hands raised. They then took him to a nearby area where young men were sitting bound on the ground and ordered his wife, Hanan, to continue walking with their three children.
On the road beyond the checkpoint, Hanan waited for half an hour, expecting her husband to be released and catch up with them. She eventually continued with the children towards a school in Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, and began trying to obtain information through the International Committee of the Red Cross.
When the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights published her testimony on 24 February 2024, more than three months had passed since Mohammed and his brother Ali were detained on the same day. Hanan said the family still did not know “whether they are alive or dead”.
It took nearly a year for Mohammed’s name to appear publicly on a list revealing where he was being held.
On 10 November 2024, the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club published the names of Gaza prisoners whom legal teams had managed to reach in the Negev and Ofer prisons during visits earlier that month.
The al-Nimnim family’s experience was repeated, in different forms and with different outcomes, by thousands of Gaza families during the Israeli assault.
Some Palestinians were detained in front of their wives and children. Others were taken from homes, schools, hospitals, checkpoints or displacement corridors. Their families then lost contact with them for weeks or months.
Some later surfaced in Israeli prisons. Others were released and returned to Gaza. Some families learned only months later that their relatives had been killed in custody, while others still have no information about their fate.
More Than 11,000 Missing Palestinians
The International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances is marked on 30 August.
The Palestinian Ministry of Justice estimates that more than 11,200 Palestinians have gone missing in Gaza since 7 October 2023, including more than 4,700 women and children.
Within this broader file, the Palestinian Centre for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons estimated in a study published for the occasion that between 2,500 and 3,000 people are suspected of having been subjected to enforced disappearance.
These are people whose whereabouts became unknown in circumstances that may have involved arrest, transfer or concealment by Israeli occupation forces.
Separately, the centre estimates that between 4,000 and 5,000 missing Palestinians are believed to remain beneath the rubble of buildings destroyed by the occupation.
In July 2025, UN experts also referred to approximately 4,000 Palestinians missing amid widespread patterns of enforced disappearance.
How Did Thousands of Gazans Vanish From View?
Mass arrests began during the first weeks of the Israeli ground invasion.
From early November 2023, occupation forces transferred thousands of Palestinians from Gaza to makeshift detention sites and prisons. Most were men and boys, although women and girls were also detained.
Large numbers were arrested during raids on hospitals and schools being used as shelters, including at least 310 healthcare workers.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said Israel kept detainees isolated from the outside world for prolonged periods and withheld information about their fate and whereabouts from their families for weeks or months.
The office said these conditions “raise serious concerns of enforced disappearance”.
The initial detention campaign also extended to Gazans who had been inside the occupied territories for work or medical treatment.
The UN human rights office estimated that more than 10,000 workers and patients from Gaza were taken into detention after 7 October. Around 3,200 were returned to Gaza in November 2023, while 6,441 were transferred to the West Bank. The fate of approximately 1,000 others remained unknown.
As the ground assault continued, places of arrest expanded from cities and refugee camps to hospitals, shelters and checkpoints through which displaced civilians were forced to pass.
A Mother Separated From Her Children for 43 Days
At one such location, Israeli forces detained Nadia Nayef al-Hilu, a mother of three from the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, and held her for 43 days.
According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Nadia was staying with her children at a school in Bureij refugee camp when Israeli forces surrounded it at the end of 2023 and ordered the women to leave towards the south.
When a soldier called her, she stepped away from her children believing it would only take a few moments.
“Don’t worry, they will give me water and then I will come back to you,” she told them.
Minutes later, she was bound inside a truck while she saw her daughter waving to her from a distance.
Occupation forces later transferred Nadia between Anatot and Damon prisons. Her children remained alone in Bureij until relatives took them in.
On 8 February 2024, Israeli soldiers returned her to Gaza through the Zikim area. She reached a Red Cross tent and contacted her children for the first time since her detention, discovering that they were in Rafah.
People Disappeared From Homes, Checkpoints, Hospitals and Aid Routes
Over time, the circumstances in which Palestinians disappeared became increasingly varied.
A study by the Palestinian Centre for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons examined 317 cases. It found that 76 people disappeared during raids on homes or the siege of neighbourhoods, while 60 vanished after returning to their homes to inspect them or collect necessities.
Another 42 disappeared while being displaced or passing through checkpoints, 39 while searching for food or waiting for aid, 22 in circumstances connected to hospitals or patient transfers, and 10 while carrying out journalistic or field work.
The sample included 41 children, 15 women and 17 people aged 60 or above.
Human rights organisations also documented cases of people who disappeared after heading to places such as al-Nabulsi Roundabout in search of aid.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights later recorded additional reports of missing people who had attempted to reach food distribution sites.
The scale of the detention campaign can also be seen in the numbers eventually released.
During the first stage of the January 2025 agreement, Israeli authorities released 1,167 Gaza residents who had been held by the military or prison authorities after it was “established” that they had not participated in the events of 7 October 2023.
Those released included women and minors under the age of 19.
Why Were Gaza Detainees Missing From Official Records?
The gap that allowed detainees to disappear from their families’ view begins with the detention system imposed by Israel after arrest.
The Israeli military carries out arrests inside Gaza, then transfers some detainees to temporary military facilities or screening and interrogation centres, keeping them in military custody before issuing detention orders under the “Unlawful Combatants Law”.
Some detainees are later transferred to Israeli Prison Service facilities.
This system, involving multiple detention bodies and separate registration procedures, created periods in which a detainee remained in military custody while relatives and lawyers were unable to locate them in official databases.
The Israeli Knesset expanded the periods during which the military could hold Gazans before issuing a detention order or bringing them before a judge.
On 18 December 2023, it approved an amendment to the “Unlawful Combatants Law” that increased the previous deadline for issuing a detention order from 96 hours to 45 days.
It also extended the period before a detainee had to be brought before a judge from 14 days to 75 days.
At one stage of the legislation, the maximum period during which detainees could be denied access to a lawyer increased from 21 to 180 days before later being reduced.
These amendments gave the military a lengthy window during which people arrested inside Gaza could be held before reaching the legal and administrative stage at which their location became easier to trace.
Hundreds Held Before Their Status Was Even Finalised
On 17 December 2024, the Israeli government presented figures to the court regarding this phase of detention.
It said approximately 3,400 Gaza detainees were in its custody at that time, including 533 under “temporary detention orders” before their classification under the “Unlawful Combatants Law” had been completed.
Around 500 detainees were being denied access to a lawyer.
The withholding of information extended to the military authority that was supposed to reveal where detainees were being held.
On 24 April 2025, the Israeli human rights organisation Gisha, which focuses on freedom of movement, said the military’s Incarceration Control Centre had refused during the first six months of the war to provide it with the locations of Gaza detainees.
In late February 2024, the centre responded to an inquiry about an 18-year-old who had been detained while his family was fleeing to Rafah by saying that, because he was a Gaza resident, the centre was not authorised to provide information about him.
Two months later, during a petition submitted by the Israeli human rights organisation HaMoked, the Israeli government told the court that the same military detention monitoring centre’s email address could be used to coordinate lawyers’ visits and that the detainee’s location would be disclosed during that coordination process.
Access to information about a detainee’s location was therefore, in some cases, tied to requesting a meeting with a lawyer at a time when the law itself allowed such meetings to be denied for extended periods.
Families Were Told There Was “No Indication of Arrest”
Gisha said that between late December 2023 and April 2025, it received requests from the families of 127 Gazans whose whereabouts became unknown after their arrest.
In 60 cases, authorities responded that there was “no indication of arrest”, even though six of those files contained testimony from relatives who had witnessed the arrest or from released detainees who said they had seen the missing person inside a detention facility.
The scale became clearer in a HaMoked report issued in May 2026.
Since October 2023, the organisation had handled requests to locate approximately 5,400 Gaza residents.
At some stage during the tracing process, 1,848 of those requests received the response that there was “no indication of arrest”.
Dozens of cases reached the Israeli Supreme Court, with 114 petitions submitted seeking disclosure of detainees’ locations.
By early August 2026, Israeli Prison Service figures collected by HaMoked showed 9,323 Palestinians classified by Israeli authorities as “security prisoners”, including 1,358 classified as “unlawful combatants”.
This category includes people held by the Prison Service under that law.
Other detainees remain in military-run facilities and are not automatically included in Prison Service figures, leaving the precise number of Gazans in detention divided between different authorities and databases.
Red Cross Visits Blocked for More Than Two and a Half Years
Israel’s refusal to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross access to Palestinian detainees further deepened their isolation.
On 5 November 2025, the ICRC said that since 7 October 2023 it had been unable to visit any Palestinian detainee in Israeli detention facilities.
It called for information about detainees’ fate and whereabouts and demanded that its visits be allowed to resume.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel and three other organisations had filed a petition in February 2024.
During the proceedings, the Israeli government requested 27 extensions.
On 3 June 2026, the court unanimously overturned the policy preventing Red Cross visits and ordered that visits resume.
Israeli authorities nevertheless continued to delay implementation of the ruling.
On 30 June, Mohammed Abdullah, spokesman for the ICRC in the West Bank, said the organisation was ready to begin visits but had still not been given a date.
In August, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said the authorities were still preventing visits from resuming and that it had been forced to return to court over the failure to implement the ruling.
One of the most important independent mechanisms for confirming a detainee’s existence, location and conditions of detention therefore remained closed for more than two and a half years.
UN Committee Says the Practice Can Amount to Enforced Disappearance
In its concluding observations concerning Israel in late 2025, the UN Committee Against Torture said that holding Palestinians incommunicado, refusing to acknowledge their deprivation of liberty or withholding information about their fate and location placed them outside the protection of the law.
The committee said such practices amounted to enforced disappearance.
It called for the fate of all detainees to be disclosed, for these cases to be investigated and for those responsible to be held accountable.
How the Fate of Some Missing Detainees Was Finally Revealed
Cases in which Israeli authorities later reversed their own answers exposed the extent to which the detention system could conceal prisoners from their families.
In three cases handled by HaMoked, Israeli authorities denied holding the men before later acknowledging, after renewed checks, that records confirmed they were in custody.
In another case handled by Gisha, authorities continued to say there was no indication that a Palestinian man had been detained even after footage was published showing him being interrogated by Israel’s Shin Bet security service.
After the case reached the Supreme Court, the Israeli government described its previous denial as an “error” and disclosed that the man was in its custody.
In other cases, families learned the truth only after the detainee had died.
A Journalist Was Declared Missing Until Israel Revealed He Had Died in Custody
Gisha uses the name “Ayman” to protect the identity of a Gaza journalist arrested in front of his family during a raid on his home in Gaza City on 12 December 2023.
His relatives watched soldiers bind him and take him away in a military vehicle.
They spent months searching for him, while released detainees provided information saying they had heard his name or seen him in detention.
In September 2024, the family received a response saying there was no indication that he was being held.
The case reached the Supreme Court in May 2025.
Only afterwards did the Israeli government tell the family that “Ayman died” while in custody and that Israel was holding his body.
During the legal proceedings, authorities acknowledged that information about his detention had existed in their records but had not appeared in the response given to the family.
A Paramedic Died the Day He Was Arrested, His Family Learned 10 Months Later
An even harsher pattern emerged in the case of a paramedic from Khan Younis whom Gisha identifies as “Khaled”.
He was in his forties, a father of six and an employee of Nasser Hospital.
Israeli forces detained him at the Netzarim checkpoint on 2 December 2023 while he was driving an ambulance transporting wounded people from northern Gaza to the south.
His family heard nothing from him after that day.
Around 10 months later, when Gisha submitted a request to determine his location in September 2024, Israeli authorities said he had died on the very day of his arrest inside the Sde Teiman military camp.
Israel continued to hold his body.
No autopsy was performed until May 2025, around a year and a half after his death.
Israeli authorities allowed a doctor representing the family to attend the autopsy only after requiring confidentiality.
By July 2026, the family still had not received the autopsy results, complete information about the circumstances of his death or his body for burial.
“I just want to know what happened to my husband,” his wife said.
A Family Searching Not for a Prisoner, but for His Body
The case of “Rami”, a pseudonym used for a 49-year-old worker from Gaza, reached a stage where his family was no longer searching for the man himself, but for his body.
He had been working inside the occupied territories with a permit before the assault and was detained during Israel’s mass arrest campaign against Gaza workers.
Released detainees said he had been transferred to Ofer and then Anatot, where he died days later.
Gisha brought his case before the Supreme Court in February 2026.
Two months later, Israeli authorities said the body previously attributed to “Rami” actually belonged to someone else.
In May, they acknowledged that he had been arrested, placed in military custody and “died while in detention”.
By June, DNA samples taken from his brothers had still failed to locate his body, leading authorities to later request samples from his children.
More Than 100 Palestinians Reported Dead in Israeli Custody
These cases form part of a growing death toll inside Israeli prisons and detention facilities.
By November 2025, Physicians for Human Rights Israel had documented at least 98 Palestinians who had died in prisons and detention centres since 7 October 2023.
Of those, 52 died in military custody, and all of them were from Gaza.
By July 2026, Gisha reported that at least 104 Palestinians had died while detained or in the custody of Israeli authorities, including 68 from Gaza.
On the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, families across Gaza are still waiting for information that will determine what happened to their relatives, some after years of uncertainty.
For many, the question is no longer who took them.
It is where the occupation hid them, who remains alive, and how those who died in custody were killed.
