The streets of Gaza bear little resemblance to the city they once were, yet what troubles many families most is not the shattered buildings but the unanswered questions. Day after day, relatives move between makeshift records desks, hospitals operating at the edge of collapse, and the few functioning civil offices, searching for names that never appear. One such searcher, a woman whose husband vanished while attempting to bring home a small amount of food, moves with the quiet determination of someone whose life has been suspended between fear and hope. She says she no longer knows whether to imagine him walking back through the door or lying unidentified beneath ruined blocks.

This sense of limbo has become an all-consuming burden. Families scour fragmented lists and faded photographs, hoping for the smallest clue. Many have examined bodies returned from prisons, where former prisoners recount severe mistreatment that leaves numerous remains beyond recognition. Others visit hospitals in the south, only to face the same bleak confusion. Even when the genocidal war pauses momentarily, the secondary struggle, the one to learn who is alive, who is detained, and who is gone forever, continues with a quiet cruelty that no ceasefire can mend.

For parents searching for children and spouses waiting for partners, the days blur into one another. A father looking for his missing son has covered public walls with photographs in the hope that the boy’s face might be spotted by someone passing through a shelter or clinic. A mother waiting at a checkpoint hours after her husband tried to reach northern Gaza says the silence that followed his disappearance feels heavier than any explosion. Each of them describes the same torment: living every day without proof of life and without proof of death. In the absence of answers, grief cannot begin, and life cannot resume. What remains is a city filled with names spoken quietly every evening, kept alive only by the insistence that they must not be forgotten.