On 23 April, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that "dozens of children go missing each week" in the Gaza Strip "against the backdrop of the postwar chaos" - a curious euphemism, no doubt, for the ongoing US-backed genocide in the Palestinian territory, which proceeds apace despite the ceasefire that was ostensibly implemented last year.
The article begins with four-year-old Mohammed Ghaban, who disappeared in early April in northern Gaza: "[H]e had been playing with his brother in front of his displaced family's tent. He went inside, asked for a hug, put on his sandals and went out." And then he was gone.
The author cites an estimate from the Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared that 2,900 children "disappeared during the war", with 2,700 bodies thought to be trapped under the rubble and the remaining 200 simply missing.
Such statistics are in keeping with the modus operandi of the Israeli military, which, according to the official fatality count, has killed more than 72,500 Palestinians in Gaza since the launch of the genocide in 2023, with thousands more still missing and presumed dead under the rubble. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.