BEIRUT — It had been one year, eight months and 27 days since Atallah al-Drimly said goodbye to his son that Saturday morning in 2024, when Mahmoud insisted he could no longer stay away from the home he had fled and started walking north toward Gaza City. It was the last anyone saw of him. But on July 28 — after fruitless searches in hospital morgues and clinics; repeated entreaties to rights groups and the Red Cross; and the constant browsing through photos of Gaza’s many unidentified dead — there was Mahmoud in a picture that had gone viral on social media, detained in an unnamed site with two Israeli soldiers posing beside him.
In the picture, Mahmoud sits on the floor flanked by the soldiers, looking diminutive, younger than his 22 years. Though the slender man in the picture is bound and blindfolded, Al-Drimly insists he could still recognize his son. I knew it was Mahmoud, 100%,” Al-Drimly said in a phone interview.
The picture shocked Al-Drimly, triggering emotions he was still parsing. Words aren’t enough to describe how I felt,” he said. Still, Al-Drimly could count himself lucky; he at least had received some word of his son.
Of the thousands who like Mahmoud went missing during the Hamas-Israel war, the crushing majority remain unaccounted for, disappeared in the death-stalked bedlam of Gaza, no hint as to whether they’re dead or alive. For their loved ones, it’s a pain that seems suspended in time, like a broken clock. Mahmoud’s case, otherwise unremarkable had it not received social media traction, is one of the more hidden consequences of Israel’s campaign on Gaza, which has killed some 73,658 people — most of them civilians — and wounded more than twice that number, according to health authorities in the enclave.
That includes the more than 1,350 people killed by Israeli fire since a national ceasefire was signed in October. Although the Health Ministry in Gaza does not differentiate between civilians and combatants, its figures are considered accurate, including by the Israeli military. Mahmoud is no fighter, his parents said.
Before the war he worked as a blacksmith, they said, and neither he nor anyone else in the family has a political affiliation, whether to Hamas or any other militant groups. Yet there were no lack of ways for civilians to be ensnared in the killing machine in Gaza since Israel began pummeling the region in October 2023, after operatives from the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel, killing roughly 1,200 people and kidnapping some 250 others. Mahmoud could have been a victim of an airstrike that collapsed a building over him, like the estimated 10,000 people authorities in Gaza believe are still buried under rubble.
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