Searching for Gaza’s missing children

Every day for the past seven months, 28-year-old Anas Juha and his surviving relatives have visited the ruins of their family home in the hope of finding the remains of their missing loved ones. On Dec. 6, a single Israeli airstrike crushed their five-storey building in Gaza City’s Al-Fayoumi neighborhood, killing 117 members of the family. Fifty-seven bodies were recovered and identified; 60 others have remained trapped under the debris ever since.

By sheer coincidence, Anas had left his wife and children at home that morning while they ate breakfast in order to run an errand at his father’s house nearby. Upon hearing the powerful blast, he rushed back to check on his family, and was horrified to find only a cloud of smoke and dust. “The whole building was reduced to rubble,” he told +972. “All I could think about was the 140 people who were inside.”

Anas began desperately searching for his family, together with his wounded cousins Mohammad and Naji, who had survived the strike after the force of the explosion propelled them out of the collapsing building. They conducted the initial search-and-rescue efforts alone, without the help of Gaza’s Civil Defense, which is tasked with locating survivors and martyrs after Israeli airstrikes; with internet and communication networks cut off across the Strip at the time, the survivors were unable to inform the emergency services of the attack. Ambulances arrived at the scene only after the first group of wounded people reached Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in private cars, and reported the location of the strike.