Bodies with names: inside Gaza’s cemetery of the missing
Lina al-Assi believes that her husband Jihad is buried in a grave in Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip, but can’t be sure without DNA identification
Maram Humaid reports in Al Jazeera on 26 May 2026:
Beside an unmarked grave, Lina al-Assi sits quietly picking flowers and pouring water over the soil, believing it to be her husband’s resting place. Jihad Tafesh went missing at the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023. Lina is a regular visitor to the site, one of about 1,200 where unidentified bodies and missing persons who could not be identified are buried.
The 26-year-old mother of two lost contact with her husband on October 8, 2023, on the second day of the war. Under heavy Israeli bombardment, he stayed behind in their home in Gaza City’s Shujayea area with his parents, while she fled with their children.
“The shelling was everywhere and the area where my house was located was very dangerous and close to the border,” Lina says. That same day, in the lulls between Israeli attacks, she searched for Jihad, who was 28 at the time. But she couldn’t find him. No concrete information about Jihad’s fate has ever reached Lina. “We contacted the Red Cross to check his fate, but with no result,” she says. “We did not know whether he was detained, injured, or killed. Nothing.”
‘Different kind of suffering’
Lina was forced to adjust to the struggle of living through war and displacement while taking care of her two children alone, five-year-old Hanaa and four-year-old Jouri, and without the support of the person she most wishes was there to help her.