In the mass grave of Gaza, anguished families hunt for their lost loved ones

Civil defence teams and doctors are racing to unearth and identify tens of thousands of bodies buried under rubble. Ruth Michaelson and Aseel Mousa report

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For the family of Malak al-Hajoj, there is no corpse, report of an airstrike or record of arrest to offer any clue about how she vanished.

One day last December, the engineering student returned to the family home in the Bureij refugee camp to try to collect books and notes after she heard her university would resume online teaching. She was not heard from again.

Her mother begged her not to go. It would be a dangerous walk north from Deir-al Balah, the city in central Gaza the family had fled to at the start of the war, but Hajoj was determined to get her notebooks. She would be back in an hour at most, she said, hugging her mother.

Two hours passed before her family, crammed into a freezing tent in Deir al-Balah, started to worry. “We kept trying to call her phone - at first it rang, but she didn't pick up,” said her cousin Diana al-Shams. “Then it stopped ringing altogether.”

The search for Hajoj quickly consumed them: they feared it was too dangerous to attempt to reach the Bureij camp as night fell. They wondered whether she had been detained or even killed by Israeli forces. They flooded social media with her pictures, begging anyone who might have information to contact them.

With a pause in fighting in place last March, the family returned to Bureij to begin their search - for their daughter or more likely her body. They said the only trace they found near the rubble of their family home was her bag next to the tracks from a bulldozer - a piece of equipment only operated by Israeli military forces.