‘The war is over, so why haven’t they come back?’: The search for Gaza’s missing
Laila Al-Helu holds a photo of her missing brother Shawqi and herself
Ahmed Ahmed and Ahmed Alsammak report in +972 on 10 November 2025:
On the morning of Sept. 28 last year, 67-year-old Abdulaziz Jouda and his friend Jabr Musleh set out to harvest olives from a grove north of Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The area, near the Netzarim Corridor occupied at the time by the Israeli army, had been designated a red, or “danger,” zone, but the men were determined to gather the season’s produce.
Jouda’s daughter, 31-year-old Ola, told +972 Magazine that a local journalist, Ahmed Allouh — who would be killed three months later by an Israeli airstrike — saw the two men that morning, and later heard two tank shells being fired in the direction of the grove. Continued shelling in the area meant that he was unable to check on them.
By evening, neither Jouda nor Musleh had returned home and they were not answering their phones. Their families began to fear the worst.
When the shelling subsided the next morning, the two men’s relatives rushed to the grove. They found Musleh’s body, along with Jouda’s bicycle, phone, and personal belongings — but no second body.
Under renewed fire, the families fled. When they returned a month later, they found nothing. They tried once more during the ceasefire in March of this year, only to discover that the grove had been bulldozed by the Israeli army.