Israel is making Palestinians disappear in more ways than one

Israel is making Palestinians disappear in more ways than one Submitted by Belen Fernandez on Wed, 04/29/2026 - 14:30 Reports of missing children and 'evaporated' bodies reveal a widening pattern of erasure in Gaza, where entire families are killed, lost under rubble or reduced to biological traces Civil defence teams search for the bodies of the Salem family under the rubble of their home destroyed by Israeli forces in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza City, 7 February 2026 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP) Off On 23 April, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that "dozens of children go missing each week" in the Gaza Strip "against the backdrop of the postwar chaos" - a curious euphemism, no doubt, for the ongoing US-backed genocide in the Palestinian territory, which proceeds apace despite the ceasefire that was ostensibly implemented last year. The article begins with four-year-old Mohammed Ghaban, who disappeared in early April in northern Gaza: "[H]e had been playing with his brother in front of his displaced family's tent. He went inside, asked for a hug, put on his sandals and went out.