Hassan Took a Bike Ride. Now He's One of the Thousands Missing in Gaza

In the early morning dark, Abeer Skaik turned to her husband, Ali Al-Qatta, and said that today would be the day they would find their son. Ali nodded in silence, and she handed him the stack of flyers. Each bore a photograph of 16-year-old Hassan smiling widely, his shoulders loose, wearing a plain red T-shirt. He is looking directly at the camera, unguarded. On top of the page, in large letters, Abeer had written a single word in bold red ink: Munashada!—an appeal.

Abeer watched as Ali stepped into a car with a few close friends and drove away. They started the 30-kilometer trip south, from al-Tuffah, east of Gaza City, to the European Hospital in Khan Younis. They had heard that a group of people detained by Israel, including children, would be released there.

The gate was already crowded. Families stood shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in blankets against the cold, clutching photographs and ID cards. Ali distributed the flyers among his friends. When the buses of released detainees arrived, he and the others moved slowly through the narrow gaps between clusters of people. Some of those who had just been released were being pulled into embraces. Ali waited at the edge of each reunion. “Have you seen my son?” he asked. One after another, people shook their heads. The crowds thinned. It was 2 am by the time Ali returned. Abeer watched her husband place the photographs on the table. They stood and looked at each other without speaking, Ali’s eyes distant as if he was entering someone else’s house. It had been 10 months since they had last been with their son.

Before the October 7 attacks, before a UN commission and a host of Palestinian and international rights groups determined that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, Abeer’s life had been organized around Hassan’s routines. He woke at the same hour every morning, ate the same foods in the same order, needed the house cleaned in a specific way—the floor washed, the table wiped after every meal. When he was 11 months old, Hassan’s parents saw that he wasn’t able to crawl or sit and that he didn’t babble the way his sister had at that age. After a long series of medical assessments, Hassan, then 5, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Abeer says Israel had denied the family’s request to obtain treatment for Hassan outside Gaza. So Abeer started teaching herself therapy techniques, how to build behavioral routines, how to manage his sensory overload. Together, she and her husband, Ali, structured Hassan’s days around safety and repetition, and they learned how to fill their house with joy. Hassan laughed when his father splashed him in the bath just the way he demanded, showed an endless appetite for turning the pages of magazines and poring through photos in restaurant menus, loved to sit on soft pillows with his mother. “I used to say I had four eyes,” Abeer says. “Mine and his. Mine never slept.”

The bombs were the first thing to break Hassan. Every explosion made the 16-year-old press a shaking hand to his chest and whisper, “Mama, my heart is scared.” Displacement fractured him again. He screamed each of the four times they had to evacuate. “Why am I leaving my home? I don’t want to leave home. I want my bed,” he said. Hassan, who could not tolerate feeling unwashed even for a few hours, went 10 full days without showering. One day while they were sheltering at a relative’s home, he carried a small bottle of water, followed his mother around, and begged for a shower.

By April 2024, scarcity had entered every part of daily life. Starvation deepened as Israel cut off food supplies. Clean water was hard to find. Abeer lost about 40 pounds. Days before Hassan disappeared, he snapped at his mother over what little food remained—only a dry concoction they called bread, made of mixed seeds that were once sold as animal feed, which left it with a repulsive smell. He did not understand why there was no real bread, no rice, no milk, no meat. Hassan stared at what he’ve been given, pushed it away, and shouted, “What are you feeding me?” In a moment of pure overwhelm, he knocked the table on its side and ran from the house.

Hassan’s confusion grew, until finally, one afternoon, he took his bicycle and pushed it through the doorway. He had learned to ride long before the war, practicing again and again along the same short stretch of street beneath their building. As he grew older, the bicycle became part of his routine. Neighbors were used to seeing him, looping the same corners, stopping in the same places, moving through the neighborhood in a way that felt safe and familiar to him.

After Hassan rode away, Abeer expected him back within minutes, as usual. But then 10 minutes passed, and 30. The light began to fade as evening approached. Ali left to search the nearby streets. Abeer remained inside, her four other children in the home, moving between the doorway and the window, her phone in her hand calling neighbors and relatives. Each time footsteps passed outside, she jumped up to look.

By night, there was no electricity, no light, and the street emptied in anticipation of heavy bombardment. Neighbors told Abeer they had not seen Hassan. No one remembered a boy riding past. After dark, her husband returned briefly, then went out again, following what remained of the routes Hassan always took—the narrow alley beside the building, the back street that avoided traffic and noise. Before the war, Hassan could move through Gaza’s streets without hesitation. He had carried the city in his head—the map that led him to relatives’ homes, to small shops, to familiar cafés, to the corners and shortcuts that anchored his routine. But these were no longer the streets he knew. Entire neighborhoods had been leveled. Buildings had fallen into the road. And Gaza had been split in two by an Israeli checkpoint on al-Rashid Street, intersecting with a militarized line dividing north and south.

“It was as if the ground swallowed him,” Abeer says.

What followed was less an investigation than a desperate, repetitive circuit—similar to the ones that thousands of Gazan families now move through. It is a shared condition, this radical uncertainty, in which the fate of missing people can seldom be resolved by any accessible authority. Some of Gaza’s missing were taken from their homes during military raids, others were last seen at checkpoints or approaching aid distribution sites, or essentially taken to be used as human shields by Israeli forces (a practice that the Israel Defense Forces says it expressly prohibits). Some have vanished into informal Israeli detention sites that yield almost no information on who is alive, dead, or in custody. Others have been effectively “evaporated” by extreme-heat munitions, leaving no recoverable bodies. Still others were buried immediately by neighbors to keep them from the dogs, without any record. Many never reach a morgue, never pass through a hospital register. Their names appear on no casualty lists, prison databases, or death registries. They are simply gone.

This is not some unavoidable consequence of war. In most contemporary conflicts, unidentified bodies are eventually linked to families through forensic identification systems. This process can take years and is often incomplete, but global systems exist to import or access the necessary technologies. Gaza, though, has been a kind of forensic desert for years now. It is a territory that has been systematically denied the tools required to name its dead.

When Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza beginning in 2007, it soon placed those tools—for toxicology testing, genetic analysis, DNA testing, and even fingerprint and biometric scanners—on a list of “dual use” items, which the government says can also be used for military purposes. There is little transparency in this realm. An official list of blocked goods used to be available online, but archived versions have not been updated since 2020, and it’s been subject