Rights centre puts Gaza's forcibly disappeared at up to 3,000

The Palestinian Center for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons estimates that 2,500 to 3,000 people were forcibly disappeared in Gaza over the course of the war. The centre published the figure on Saturday and said it rests on field assessments rather than on any completed count.

Enforced disappearance, as the United Nations defines it, is an arrest, detention or abduction carried out by state authorities or with their consent, followed by a refusal to say what became of the person. The distinction matters here because Gaza has two separate populations of the unaccounted-for, and the centre kept them apart: alongside the disappearance estimate it put 4,000 to 5,000 people believed to be still lying under collapsed buildings. Access to much of the territory, the risks of working there and the shortage of machinery have all slowed the search.

The estimate sits on a documented sample of 317 cases, released as a study to coincide with the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, which falls on Sunday. The centre warned that the sample should not be read as representative of everyone missing in Gaza, only as an indication of how the disappearances have tended to happen.

Of the 317, a little over 95 percent — 302 people — were male and 15 were female. The sample includes 41 children and 17 people aged 60 or over. Geographically the cases cluster in the north — 89 of them in Gaza City, 74 in North Gaza — against 59 in Khan Younis, 37 in the central governorate and 32 in Rafah.

The circumstances are where the study does its work. The largest single group, 76 cases, disappeared during Israeli raids on homes or sieges of residential blocks. But 60 more vanished on ordinary errands — going back to a house to check on it or to collect necessities — and 42 on displacement routes or at military checkpoints. Another 39 were last seen searching for food or waiting at an aid convoy. Medical facilities being stormed or besieged account for 22 of the cases, and journalistic or other field work for 10.

The centre tied the food cases directly to hunger, saying shortages had pushed civilians into places they would otherwise have kept away from, including ground under Israeli military control. In several cases, it said, surveillance aircraft had been tracking a person's movements before contact with them was lost.

Restrictions on the International Committee of the Red Cross and on its ability to visit detainees have widened the uncertainty, according to the centre. Where a detention is not acknowledged and no independent body can verify who is held, a family has no way of establishing whether a relative is in a cell or a grave. A report published by the Palestinian justice ministry in April put the number reported missing or forcibly disappeared since October 2023 above 11,200, more than 4,700 of them women and children.

The centre asked for an independent international mechanism to investigate the cases and hold those responsible to account, for the Red Cross to be given access to detainees, and for the fate of the missing to be disclosed. It said it would go on documenting cases and updating its database, and described the issue as a legal and humanitarian one rather than a matter of statistics.

The insistence on that category is not a technicality. Remains under rubble are recovered when equipment and access allow, and the figure comes down as the work proceeds. A disappearance ends only when a state produces either the person or the record, and until it does, nothing about the number changes.