“My daughter’s bones were scattered on the ground.”

Everything is mixed together. Multicolored children's backpack. Running shoes. Steel bowl pierced with splinters. Pieces of beds, chairs, stoves, and lampshades; Broken window glass, mirrors and drinking glasses. Scraps of clothing.

These recent torn and dust-covered items can be signs. They often belong to the dead lying near the surface of the ruins.

Haitham Al-Homs, director of emergency and ambulance services at the Civil Defense Service in Rafah, says, “Since the withdrawal of the occupation forces from Rafah, we have received about 150 calls from civilians about the presence of the bodies of their relatives under the houses.” In the far south of the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian health authorities estimate the number of missing people at ten thousand people. Where there are no clear signs such as clothes on the surface, search teams rely on information received from relatives and neighbors, or follow the smell of death emanating from the rubble.

Warning: This story contains disturbing content

The Israeli government has banned the BBC and other international news organizations from entering Gaza and reporting independently. We rely on trusted local journalists to record the experiences of people like those searching for missing persons.

At the end of each day, Mr. Homs updates the list of people found. His team carefully excavates the ruins, knowing they are searching for fragments of broken humanity. Often what is recovered is nothing more than a pile of bones. High explosive bombs fired by Israel exploded and tore many of the dead into pieces. The bones and remnants of clothing are placed in white bags on which Mr. Homs writes the Arabic word “anonymous.” It means “anonymous”.

A resident of Rafah, Osama Saleh, returned to his house after the ceasefire, and found a skeleton inside. The skull was fractured. Mr Saleh believes the body remained there for four to five months. “We are human beings with feelings,” he says. “I cannot convey to you how miserable the tragedy is.” Being surrounded every day by the smell of decaying corpses is a deeply disturbing experience, as those who have witnessed the effects of mass death will often attest.

Osama Saleh says: “The bodies are terrifying. We see the horror.” “I swear it hurts, I cried.”

Families also flock to hospitals to search for remains. In the courtyard of the European Hospital in southern Gaza, collections of bones and clothes are spread out on body bags.

The disappearance of Abdel Salam Al-Mughir, 19 years old, from Rafah in the Al-Shaboura area. According to his uncle Zaki, it was a place you never came back from if you went during the war. “So, we didn't go looking for him there for that reason. We weren't going back.”

Zaki believes that the group of bones and clothes in front of him belong to the missing Abdul Salam. He stands with the hospital worker, Jihad Abu Khreis, waiting for Abdel Salam's brother to arrive.

Abu Khreis says: “It is 99% certain that the body belongs to him, but now we need final confirmation from his brother, the person closest to him, to confirm that the pants and shoes belong to him.”

Shortly after, the brother arrived from Al-Mawasi refugee camp, also located in southern Gaza. He had a picture of Abdel Salam on his phone. And there was a picture of his running shoes.

He knelt in front of the body bag and pulled the lid back. Touch the skull and clothes. Saw shoes. There were tears in his eyes. Identification was complete.

Another family moved along the row of body bags. There was a grandmother, her son, her adult sister, and a young child. The child remained at the back of the group while the elderly woman and her son looked under the cover of a body bag. They stared for a few seconds and then hugged each other sadly.

Then, the family, with the help of hospital workers, removed the remains. They were crying, but no one shouted out loud.

Aya Al-Dabaa was 13 years old and was living with her family and hundreds of other refugees in a school in Tal Al-Hawa in Gaza City in the north. She was one of nine children. One day, at the beginning of the war, Aya went to the bathroom on the top floor of the school, and her family says she was shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper. The Israeli army says it does not target civilians and blames Hamas for launching attacks from civilian areas. During the war, the UN Human Rights Office said there was “heavy shooting by Israeli forces in densely populated areas leading to apparent unlawful killings, including of unarmed bystanders.”

The family buried Aya next to the school, and her mother, Lina Al-Dabh (43 years old), wrapped her in a blanket to “protect her from the rain and the sun” in case the grave was disturbed and exposed to weather elements.

When the Israeli army took over the school, Lina fled to the south. She went with four other children – two daughters and two sons – to reunite with her husband who had gone earlier with the couple's other children. Lena had no choice but to leave her daughter where she lay, hoping to return and retrieve the remains for a proper burial once peace came.

“Aya was a very nice girl, and everyone loved her,” Lina says. “She loved everyone, her teachers and her studies, and she was very good at school. She wished everyone well.” When the ceasefire came, Lina asked her relatives who still lived in the north to check Aya's grave. The news was devastating.

She says: “They told us that her head was in one place, her legs were in another place, and her ribs were in another place. The person who went to visit her was shocked and sent us pictures.”

“When I saw her, I couldn’t understand how I took my daughter out of her grave, and how the dogs ate her? I can’t control my nerves.”

Relatives collected the bones and soon Lina and her family would travel north to move Aya's remains to a suitable grave. For Lina, there is endless grief, an unanswered question – the same question asked by so many parents who lost their children in Gaza. What could they have done differently, given the circumstances of the war as they were? “I couldn’t take her from the place where she was buried,” Lina says. Then you ask: “Where can I take it?”

Additional reporting by Malak Hassouna, Alice Doyard and Adam Campbell.