Following an attack by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas three years ago, Israel launched a retaliatory offensive that practically destroyed Gaza. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health and local medical authorities, the total number of Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023, exceeds 74,000, with more than 175,000 injured. But there is another terrible figure: The Palestinian Civil Defense estimates that more than 8,000 people may be missing beneath the rubble, and Colombia’s experience could help locate missing people.
Ajith Sunghay, head of the U.N. Human Rights Office in the occupied Palestinian territory, has an even more discouraging assessment. He warned that this figure is likely a significant underestimate, since it has not been possible to compile a complete record of all missing people. Only a few details are known, such as the fact that between late June and mid-September, the Palestinian Civil Defense recovered 329 bodies and human remains in Gaza City and its surroundings, 261 of them belonging to women and children.
Since the ceasefire was announced in October 2025, Palestinian teams have recovered more than 800 bodies across the Strip, despite a severe shortage of machinery, fuel, and personnel. At the current pace, the operation could take at least another ten years. The Civil Defense currently has only one operational excavator, and on some occasions, its teams have had to remove rubble with their bare hands.
Colombia’s experience could help locate missing people in Gaza
Thus, thousands of families in Gaza still do not know what happened to their loved ones. Some may be beneath buildings destroyed by the bombings; others have still not been located. To make matters worse, the search does not depend solely on finding the places where they might be. Equipment, forensic laboratories, DNA tests, and systems capable of bringing together scattered information are also needed.
Amid these difficulties, an experience developed in Colombia offers an alternative: Beginning the search with a humanitarian approach, without waiting for the conflict to end or for justice mechanisms to be established. This is the experience accumulated by the Search Unit for Persons Deemed Missing (UBPD), created as a result of the 2016 Peace Agreement. Omar Al-Assouli, strategic adviser to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Palestine, believes that this Colombian model can provide tools to address the emergency in Gaza.
UBPD has a humanitarian and extrajudicial mandate. Its role is to search for people who disappeared in the context of the Colombian armed conflict, both those who may still be alive and those who died and whose remains must be recovered, identified, and returned to their families. Unlike a judicial process, humanitarian searches do not aim to determine criminal responsibility.
This approach makes it possible to advance the search for missing people without making every action dependent on the progress of investigations or trials. This difference is fundamental in a territory where families need immediate answers, Al-Assouli considered. He was in Bogota participating in the international symposium Dialogues on Disappearance and Search: Nine Years of Lessons Learned by UBPD, a Decade After the Peace Agreement, organized by UBPD.
The symposium was guided by reflections and questions such as: How do you search for a missing person when decades have passed since their disappearance? How do you search when the armed conflict is still ongoing? What can science, technology, research, local knowledge, and, above all, the people searching contribute?
There, the Colombian experience was discussed alongside the experiences of countries such as Argentina, Peru, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Spain, and Cyprus, where searches have had to confront the effects of conflicts under dictatorships, as well as the experience of Palestine, where disappearances occur amid ongoing violence and conflict.
Immediate search for the truth about missing people
The proposal is not to mechanically transfer the Colombian model to Gaza, but to draw on its principles to organize searches under extraordinarily difficult conditions. One of the main lessons from the Colombian experience is that searches can begin before a definitive peace agreement is reached.
Since UBPD does not seek to determine criminal responsibility, searches can move forward without depending on judicial proceedings, and this would work very well in Gaza. “People are suffering, and every day counts. They do not need a transitional justice process now, nor are they waiting for one. They do not need to see the people who made their relatives disappear in prison. What they are looking for immediately is the truth and information about them,” Al-Assouli told Spain’s El Pais newspaper.
The proposal is to develop a comprehensive system to facilitate several essential tasks, such as consolidating records of missing people in a common information database; avoiding duplication and reducing the need for families to repeat their testimonies over and over again; linking data on the place of disappearance, the last known movements, and possible recovery sites; preserving information that could be lost over time; and facilitating the identification of remains through coordination with forensic specialists and laboratories when conditions allow.
Criminal investigations will follow their own course
Criminal investigations will follow a separate path. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk stressed that recovering bodies is also essential to determining the circumstances in which the victims died and establishing possible responsibility.
In this regard, he called for international investigators to be granted access to all areas of the Strip so they can contribute to the collection and preservation of evidence, particularly in view of ongoing judicial proceedings related to the conduct of hostilities in Gaza. “Every possible measure must be taken to document and identify the victims, preserve forensic information and biological samples, record the places where they were buried, and inform their families,” he stated.
“Families’ right to know the fate of their loved ones does not end with identification and a dignified burial. They deserve to know the whole truth,” he added.
The Human Rights Office recalled that a 2024 report had already expressed serious concerns about the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated areas and compliance with the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution required by international humanitarian law.
“The discovery of numerous remains beneath the rubble in Gaza City once again brings these concerns about war crimes and other atrocity crimes to the fore,” Türk stated, warning that Israel has an obligation to search for missing people, recover and identify the dead, and preserve potential evidence. “These attacks must be effectively investigated. When violations are established, those responsible must be held accountable,” he said.