“My daughter's bones were scattered on the ground”

Everything is mixed. Children's multicolored backpack. A running shoe. A steel vessel perforated by shrapnel. Parts of beds, chairs, stoves, lampshades; the glass of broken windows, mirrors, drinking glasses. Clothes scraps.

These last cut, dust-covered elements may be markers. Often they belong to the dead lying near the surface of the rubble.

“Since the Israeli occupation forces withdrew from Rafah, we have received about 150 calls from civilians about the presence of the bodies of their relatives under the houses,” said Haitham al-Homs, director of emergency services and ambulances at the civil protection agency in Rafah, in the southernmost edge of the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian health authorities estimate that 10,000 people are missing. When there is no obvious marker such as clothing on the surface, search teams rely on information from relatives and neighbors or follow the smell of death emanating from the ruins.

WARNING: This story contains disturbing content

The Israeli government has banned the BBC and other international news organizations from entering Gaza and reporting independently. We rely on trusted local journalists to record the experiences of people like those searching for the missing.

At the end of each day, Mr. Holmes updates the list of finds. His team carefully excavates the rubble, aware that they are looking for fragments of broken humanity. Often what is recovered is little more than a pile of bones. Israel's high-explosive bombs blew up and disfigured many of the dead. The bones and scraps of clothing are placed in white body bags on which Mr Homs writes the Arabic word 'majhoul'. It means “unidentified”.

A resident of Rafah, Osama Saleh, returned to his home after the ceasefire and found a skeleton inside. The skull was fractured. Mr. Saleh estimated the body had been lying there for four to five months. “We are people with feelings… I can't tell you how unfortunate the tragedy is,” he says. To be surrounded every day by the smell of decomposing bodies is a deeply disturbing experience, as those who have witnessed the effects of mass death often testify.

“The bodies are horrific. We see horror,” says Osama Saleh. “I swear it's a painful feeling, I cried.”

Families also arrive at hospitals to search for remains. In the courtyard of the European Hospital in southern Gaza, collections of bones and clothing are strewn over body bags.

Abdul Salam al-Muhayer, 19, from Rafah, disappeared in the Shabura area; according to his uncle zaki, it's a place you don't come back from if you go there during the war. “So we didn't go looking for him there for that reason. We weren't going back.'

Zaki believes that a set of bones and clothes in front of him belong to the missing Abdul Salam. He stands with a hospital worker, Jihad Abu Hrays, waiting for Abdul Salam's brother to arrive.

“It is 99% certain that the body is his,” says Mr. Abu Kreis, “but now we need the final confirmation from his brother, from the people closest to him, to be sure that the pants and shoes are his. “

Soon after, the brother arrived from the al-Mawasi tented refugee camp, also in southern Gaza. He had a picture of Abdul Salam in his phone. There was a picture of his sneakers.

He knelt before the sack of corpses and pulled back the cover. He touched the skull, the clothes. He saw the shoes. There were tears in his eyes. Identification was complete.

Another family moved past the row of body bags. There was a grandmother, her son, an elderly sister and a small child. The child was held at the back of the group while the old woman and her son watched under the lid of the body bag. They stared at each other for a few seconds and then hugged each other in grief.

The family, assisted by hospital workers, then removed the remains. They cried, but no one cried aloud.

Aya al-Dabeh was 13 years old and lived with her family and hundreds of other refugees at a school in Tal al-Hawa, in Gaza City in the north. She was one of nine children. One day early in the war, Aya went to the bathroom upstairs at the school and – her family says – she was shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper. The Israel Defense Forces say they are not targeting civilians and accuse Hamas of attacking from civilian areas. During the war, the UN Human Rights Office said there was “intense shelling by Israeli forces in densely populated areas, resulting in apparently unlawful killings, including of unarmed bystanders”.

The family buried Aya next to the school, and her mother Lina al-Daba, 43, wrapped her in a blanket “to protect her from the rain and the sun” in case the grave was disturbed and exposed to the elements.

When the Israeli military took over the school, Lina fled south. She went with four other children – two daughters and two sons – to be reunited with her husband, who had left earlier with the couple's other children. Lina had no choice but to leave her daughter where she lay, hoping to return and retrieve the remains for a proper burial once peace had prevailed.

“Aya was a very sweet girl and everyone loved her. She loved everyone, her teachers and her studies and was very good at school. He wished everyone well,” says Lina. When the armistice came, Lina asked relatives still living in the north to check on Aya's grave. The news was devastating.

“We were told her head was in one place, her legs were in another place and her ribs were somewhere else. The one who went to visit her was shocked and sent us the pictures,” she says.

“When I saw her, I couldn't understand how my daughter was taken out of the grave and how the dogs ate her? I can't control my nerves.”

Relatives have collected the bones and soon Lina and her family will travel north to transfer Aya's remains to a proper burial. For Lina, there is endless grief and a question that has no answer—the same question that confronts so many parents who have lost children in Gaza. What could they have done differently under the circumstances of the war? “I couldn't take her from where she was buried,” Lina says. Then she asks, “Where could I have taken her?”

With additional reporting by Malak Hassouneh, Alice Doyard, Adam Campbell.