Around noon one Sunday in December 2023, Intisar Al-Awdah’s 21-year-old son, Salem, told his mother that he was leaving their UN shelter in Deir Al-Balah to bring blankets for the rest of the family, who were shivering in the cold of Gaza’s winter. Salem never came back. To this day, his mother has no idea where he went or how she lost him. 

Al-Awdah, 55, had already lost her 25-year-old son, Khaled, in the first week of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023. His death prompted her to flee their home in Gaza City out of fear for her other four children. They headed south to Deir Al-Balah, and for the next 15 months, they would remain cut off from their home by the presence of Israeli troops in the Netzarim Corridor.

Within the first month of the war, Israeli forces had occupied Netzarim — which sits about five kilometers south of Gaza City and bisects the Strip, encompassing more than 21 square miles of Gaza’s territory — and emptied the area of all its Palestinian inhabitants. Israel then proceeded to construct more than a dozen military outposts and bases along the corridor, cementing its military footprintand preventing displaced Palestinians from returning north.

Throughout Israel’s assault on Gaza, stories of indiscriminate killings of Palestinian civilians, forced disappearances, and general lawlessness in the corridor circulated among Gazans. Early on, they colloquially referred to Netzarim as an “axis of death.” A Haaretz report from December 2024, based on testimonies from active-duty soldiers, officers, and reservists, described the corridor as a “kill zone” where commanders permitted and even instructed soldiers to shoot any Palestinian who entered the area, including children and the elderly. Soldiers revealed that various units competed with each other to kill the most Palestinians, and that civilian deaths were retroactively counted as slain militants.

Frantic and desperate, Al-Awdah searched everywhere for Salem, including around Netzarim. “Every day I went [there] to look for my son,” she told +972. “I asked the young men sitting in Al-Nuwairi [situated at the entrance to Netzarim, by the sea] on the beach. No one saw him.” Al-Awdah contacted everyone she knew — including her son’s friends at the UN school where they had been sheltering, and all of her relatives who remained in the north — to see if they’d heard from him, but to no avail.

When news of the ceasefire arrived, Al-Awdah was hopeful. With more freedom of movement, she could look for Salem everywhere in Gaza. She immediately went back to Netzarim, asking Civil Defense personnel if they had seen a young man wearing matching gray pajamas.

After Israel withdrew its troops from the corridor on Feb. 9, as part of the ceasefire deal, Al-Awdah was joined by many other parents looking for their missing sons. She hopes her worst suspicion that Salem was killed by the Israeli army is wrong, but it is the uncertainty that troubles Al-Awdah most. “The mothers that were able to find their sons’ bodies and hug them are lucky,” she said. “At least they know their fate and had the chance to bury them.”

‘The area had completely changed’

Netzarim is named after an Israeli settlement dismantled during Israel’s so-called “disengagement” from the Strip in 2005 under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. For the last two decades, the area remained mostly agricultural, with a number of distinct residential buildings and schools — including a branch of Al-Azhar University in the Mughraqa area, which sits on the perimeter of the corridor.

The university branch, along with most structures in the area, was completely demolished by Israeli airstrikes during the first months of the war. Journalist Osama Al-Kahlout described to +972 the scene at Netzarim following the Israeli army’s withdrawal as “painful and tragic.” A large sign reading “Gaza Welcomes You” once greeted Palestinians driving through the area. Now, it is conspicuously absent. “The buildings are completely destroyed and the agricultural lands have been swept away,” he noted. “There are no landmarks left.”

One of those landmarks was the Sawafiri Palace, a modern residential building situated directly on the Netzarim junction and which housed 20 members of the Al-Sawafiris, a prominent Gazan family in the animal feed trade. Built just three years ago, the complex cost the family approximately $2 million. 

“We had hopes of finding some remnant of the palace,” Adi Al-Sawafiri, 25, told +972. “Unfortunately it was turned into a pile of rubble. There is no indication that there was ever a building there. We were shocked by the destruction — I cannot find words to express my feelings.” The poultry feed factories adjacent to the palace were also destroyed.

Those feelings of shock and despair were widespread among the thousands of Gazans who passed through Netzarim on their way back north, after the Israeli army withdrew. Some sat in their cars for between five and eight hours as they waited for Egyptian, American, and Qatari security contractors to inspect each vehicle passing through the corridor.

Tala Imad, a 23-year-old from Gaza City who was displaced to Al-Mawasi in the south, was among the crowds who crossed Netzarim after Israeli forces withdrew from the area. On Feb. 10, she and her family dismantled their tent, packed their belongings, and departed Al-Mawasi. Imad’s family decided to go straight to their relatives’ house in Al-Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza, after learning from relatives that their own house — part of a six-story building in the southern Gaza City neighborhood of Tel Al-Hawa — was completely destroyed in January 2024.

From Al-Mawasi, they merged onto Salah Al-Din Street, Gaza’s main north-south thoroughfare. After a few hours of driving, during which Imad fell asleep intermittently, they finally reached Wadi Gaza — a strip of wetlands that marks the southernmost point of the Netzarim Corridor. “The destruction started to become visible,” Imad recalled. “On both sides of Salah Al-Din Street, there used to be vast agricultural areas. Nothing remained of them.”

Upon reaching the edge of the corridor, Imad continued, “each car took about a quarter of an hour to be searched. Everyone was tired from waiting.” And while other families in the cars ahead chatted with the Egyptian officers, Imad said she didn’t have the energy.

“I was just in shock, especially when I noticed the ‘Gaza Welcomes You’ sign was missing,” she said. Darkness fell as they continued to pass through the Netzarim area. “I felt like I was in a ghost town. There was no lighting. The rubble and the great emptiness were painful.”

Imad’s father recalled an auto shop in the area that, along with most everything else, had been razed to the ground. The owner and his sons, who also manufactured iron garage doors, had saved him on multiple occasions when his car broke down while driving south. In addition to losing their house, which sat above their business, the family had lost their only source of income.

Friends of Imad’s who had returned north earlier explained to her that a series of new roads Israel built during its occupation of Netzarim would lead the family north, but the destruction was completely disorienting and she couldn’t find them. “The area had completely changed: it used to be a paved street that was easy to navigate, but had turned into a rough road of rubble,” Imad explained.

After about eight hours of driving, Imad and her family finally reached their relatives in Al-Shati camp. Despite the devastation throughout northern Gaza, they now plan to stay there; crossing Netzarim was an experience they do not want to repeat, and the south remains tainted by the memory of their displacement.

Unidentified bodies 

Like the Imad family, Salem Awad left his tent in Al-Mawasi as soon as the Israeli army withdrew from Netzarim and set off alone for the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City. As soon as he verified that his house was still standing, the 37-year-old father of four returned to his tent, packed up, and made the journey home with his wife and children.

Passing through Netzarim was a traumatizing ordeal for Awad’s children. “When we approached the Egyptians who were searching and inspecting the cars, my 5-year-old son, Ghaith, was afraid; he closed his eyes and refused to look at them,” Awad recounted.

Awad explained to the confused Egyptian security official that his son was afraid of Israeli soldiers and assumed that he was one too. “The Egyptian man tried to play with him and laugh, but Ghaith remained afraid and did not talk to him,” Awad said.

In the past, Netzarim was an otherwise unremarkable area with clearly paved roads. Today, even weeks after the Israeli withdrawal, it remains a chokehold that restricts Palestinian mobility between the two halves of the Strip. Awad, who has remained in Gaza City with his family, told +972 that Palestinians are forced to rely on word-of-mouth advice in order to navigate Netzarim’s checkpoint and dirt roads. “Everyone asks: is there a lot of traffic? Does the barrier allow for fast passage or does it take time? Unfortunately, it is a big problem and there is no ease of movement like we had before the war.”

When Awad crossed Netzarim for the second time with his family, he recalled a woman crying at the checkpoint. “She asked the [authorities] if she could approach Netzarim because she had been searching for her son for three months,” he explained. “At that moment, my wife cried for the woman. Taking in the destruction and loss around me, I felt like the war had just begun.”

Nearly a month after Israel’s withdrawal from the corridor, Al-Awdah, too, has yet to locate her son. Al-Kahlout, the journalist, and other first responders have found skeletons of Gazans who were killed in the area. “We do not know the reason for their killing,” he said. “Were they killed after being displaced from the north to the south? Or while trying to return north? Or were they prisoners who the Israeli army killed there?”

Since Feb. 9, Dr. Mohammed Al-Mughair, an official from the Palestinian Civil Defense, has found the remains of at least 10 people in the vicinity of Netzarim. He and his colleagues have been trying, unsuccessfully, to identify them based on their personal belongings. “We found various belongings with each body — one of which was decomposed — including clothes and house keys,” he explained. “We posted them on social media, hoping that perhaps someone will recognize them.”

Many Gazans, Al-Mughair told +972, have been reaching out to find the whereabouts of their relatives, but the Civil Defense has only begun its search for the missing in Netzarim. “We were unable to reach the eastern areas of Netzarim due to the continuing presence of the army there [in an expanded buffer zone], and we are still waiting for urgent relief [from international aid groups] to help us,” he noted. “It is a very difficult and sad situation.”