Israel is making Palestinians disappear in more ways than one
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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)
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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." And then he was gone.
The author cites an estimate from the Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared that 2,900 children "disappeared during the war", with 2,700 bodies thought to be trapped under the rubble and the remaining 200 simply missing.
Such statistics are in keeping with the modus operandi of the Israeli military, which, according to the official fatality count, has killed more than 72,500 Palestinians in Gaza since the launch of the genocide in 2023, with thousands more still missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned back in September that the true death toll might already have been more in the vicinity of 680,000.
Speaking of disappearances, an Al Jazeera Arabic investigation revealed in February that at least 2,842 Palestinians had "evaporated" in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war - a phenomenon Gaza's civil defence teams attribute to Israel's use of US-manufactured thermal and thermobaric weapons, which effectively "vaporise" human bodies.
The gruesome tally was quickly eclipsed by the deranged US-Israeli war on Iran and wider regional catastrophe, which has monopolised the news for the past two months. But the topic remains as sinisterly relevant as ever.
In remarks to Al Jazeera at the time, civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal outlined the process for determining the number of vaporised victims at homes targeted by Israeli strikes: "If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we treat the remaining two as 'evaporated' only after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces - blood spray on walls or small fragments like scalps."
Vaporised bodies
Upon publication of these macabre findings, the Israeli military got its panties into a genocidal bunch and issued a huffy communique to allegedly set the record straight.
Rejecting Al Jazeera's "false claim of the evaporation of Gazan bodies", the army insisted that it "uses only lawful munitions" and that it "strikes military targets and objectives in accordance with international law and takes all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians and civilian property to the extent possible."
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It's not clear, of course, why a military that has been accused of potentially killing nearly 700,000 people - and that wipes out entire families and neighbourhoods without so much as batting an eye - took such particular offence at the whole "evaporation" matter.
Granted, disappearing bodies into thin air is a pretty good way of hiding the true extent of mass slaughter.
And while the vaporisation of Palestinian bodies may not fit the official legal definition of enforced disappearance, it is quite literally exactly that.
At least 2,842 Palestinians had 'evaporated' ... [which] civil defence teams attribute to Israel's use of thermal and thermobaric weapons, which effectively 'vaporise' human bodies
According to the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "an enforced disappearance is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law".
In light of Israel's explicit disappearing act in Gaza, however, a considerable expansion of that definition would seem to be in order.
And yet Israel is guilty of the traditional variety of enforced disappearance, as well. Last August, UN experts denounced reports that starving Palestinian civilians - including a child - were being forcibly disappeared from aid distribution sites run by the notorious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Backed by Israel and the US, the foundation also specialised in massacring desperate folks who had gathered in search of food and other necessary items for survival.
Meanwhile, in both Gaza and the West Bank, Israel's enforced disappearances of medical personnel, journalists and all manner of other humans have flourished since the onset of the genocide - not that this hasn't always been par for the course.
Global pattern
For its part, the US has had a hand in enforced disappearances in a whole lot of places around the world, including by aiding and abetting bloodthirsty right-wing regimes throughout Latin America during the Cold War.
Tens of thousands were disappeared in Argentina, Guatemala and beyond as the US and its buddies nobly went about making the hemisphere safe for capitalism.
In Mexico, more than 130,000 persons have been disappeared, the vast majority of them following the launch in 2006 of the US-backed "war on drugs", which would be more aptly characterised as a war on the poor.
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But from Mexico to the Middle East, the number of disappeared hardly conveys the extent of victimisation. The families of the missing are victims, too, condemned as they are to indefinite psychological limbo in the absence of concrete information regarding the fate of their loved ones - without which it is impossible to commence the grieving process or obtain the emotional closure that is necessary to move on with one's life.
In the case of Israel's "evaporation" of Palestinians in Gaza, it's hard to say whether the knowledge that your loved one has been vaporised is concrete enough to enable eventual closure. After all, there's nothing very concrete about being forcibly vanished without a trace.
Indeed, Al Jazeera quotes Palestinian father Rafiq Badran on the almost inconceivable psychological torment that attends Israel's sinister new spin on the theme of enforced disappearance: "Four of my children just evaporated," Badran said, holding back tears. "I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?"
Now, with regional war raging as the arms industry rakes in big bucks, it has become even easier for global audiences to tune out the unique plight of the Palestinians - which means that the genocide is effectively being disappeared from the spotlight, as well.
In the end, of course, the Israeli goal is nothing less than to forcibly disappear the very idea of a Palestinian people. But unfortunately for Israel, its blood-drenched legacy will not be so easily concealed.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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