Deir Al-Balah- Gaza Strip The corpses were arriving every day, sometimes dozens, after being pried from the rubble for 15 months and plucked from the battlefield by the Morg who brought them to the Gaza Strip. Eager search and rescue teams were unable to reach.

The bodies, unearthed from this week's ceasefire, are among Gaza's "disappearances," the countless deaths scattered by the war that haunt families. For Gaza's health ministry, they were reduced to a bullet warning beneath the daily death toll: "Many victims are still in the rubble and streets, inaccessible."

The deadliest fighting in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was suspended on Sunday as a deal between Israel and Hamas, with families across the enclave scrambling to reunite with loved ones - the living, the dead and the missing.

Palestinians crowded the ruins of what were once homes and watched anxiously as civil defense teams chopped away the rubble in search of missing bodies. Each day of the ceasefire, the ministry recorded between 50 and 120 bodies.

"From the moment the truce started, we were searching and searching," said Samira Alshaar, 58, who returned home on Sunday after she was killed nine months ago by Rafah. During the attack she fled to the house she had fled to nine months earlier. She watched as her son Ibrahim Qeshta was killed by an airstrike before he could escape with her.

"We left our son behind," she said.

Ibrahim's younger brother, Abdullah Qeshta, clawed his way through blasted concrete and twisted steel bars with his bare hands on Wednesday, his face glistening with sweat that coated his family life. For three days amid adrenaline and pain, he and civil defense workers said they simply took breaks to pray and sleep.

Alshaar watched and said she felt like she was losing hope.

But suddenly, the men started shouting. They lifted pieces of stone and concrete to the side.

In the dirt were tattered fragments of 37-year-old Ibrahim's navy blue pajamas, which he wore on May 6, 2024, when an Israeli airstrike sent everyone running. Ibrahim ran in the opposite direction, yelling to his mother that he would be back for a second, then grabbed the blanket. Then the house was knocked down and the walls fell on him.

"That's my brother's hair, I'm sure it's him," Abdullah Qeshta said, his voice trembling. "Oh, God, thank you, God."

Ibrahim's body was in a state of decomposition. But in a sense, Arshar says, she feels "satisfied." She could give her son the dignity of a proper burial. She could find a place to mourn him.

"He can rest now," she said.

In an interview, Gaza health official Zaher al-Wahidi put the number of missing people and unheralded bodies at around 8,000, based on family reports of missing relatives.

It is impossible to verify more than 15 months after Hamas launched a cross-border attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, kidnapping about 250 people, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and triggering the Israeli military movement of revenge.

But rescue teams, experts and rights groups agree the Health Ministry's official death toll (47,283, with no difference between civilians and combatants as of Friday) represents a significant effort. Israel blames Hamas for heavy civilian casualties as the group embeds itself in residential areas.

Authorities say "missing" could mean a body like Ibrahim's rotting under rubble or rotting in the hot sun for months. Residents described stockpiling and rescue workers finding bloated bodies in the streets in parts of northern Gaza, where ambulances and rescue workers were hampered by Israeli airstrikes and exchanges of fire.

Al-Wahidi said the missing also included Palestinians who were killed and buried where identified Palestinians were found, or who marched into Israeli detention centers.

Families coming to terms with their disappearance have flocked to Gaza's medical examiner's office since the ceasefire lasted.

At the main evidence collection center in Rafah on Wednesday, workers wrapped the body and a small pile of remains in white plastic bags and placed them on the sidewalk. Inside, a man brought in to identify a loved one gasping and blinking, a pile of bones. He recognized the scarves and shoes of a family member found with them - exactly who it was unclear. He was too distraught to speak. He groaned as he doubled.

Investigators put names on green-tagged bags. If the identity is not yet known, they mark the bags with numbers in the hope that one day long-term coverage of the Gaza Strip will allow them to obtain DNA tests that would allow authorities to return the unclaimed dead to their families.

"We are leaving the numbered bags in a specially designated place where they can be identified in the future," said Dr. Ahmed Zuhair, head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Rafah. "All we can do is ask international agencies to please, please help us."

Some of the recovered bodies surfaced when recent rains washed away layers of soil or were dug up by wild dogs that tore and scattered human limbs, officials said Wednesday.

After hours, sometimes days, of digging and setting aside mountains of rubble, the remaining remains were dug out on shovels. Civil defense officials reported that Gaza had no more than three excavators - the heavy machinery needed for rescue efforts.

"We need the help of hundreds of rubble removal experts and thousands of large machines," Al-Wahidi said. Otherwise, he warned: "We will not be able to recover the bodies."

Every day of the ceasefire so far, Mohammad Deifallah, like dozens of other Palestinians, has arrived at the forensic center in Rafah filled with desperate hope.

On Wednesday, he reached out for a tote bag and put his hand to his nose because of the smell. He said his brother, who he lost 50 days ago, was nowhere to be found in a chaotic search as Israeli bombardment of Rafah intensified.

"I didn't know where to go. I checked all these bodies." Deifallah lifted the tarp to look for bones. "There's nothing like him. Nothing even identifiable."

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Debre reported from Jerusalem. Fatma Khaled in Cairo contributed to this report.