‘What happened?’: No peace for Shamikh Badra, who fears for family missing in Gaza since 2023 Palestinian-Australian man has not had word as to whereabouts of his brother or his brother’s wife and children for more than a year – and he is not alone in his uncertainty and grief.
In the days after Ehab vanished, Shamikh and friends and family called his brother’s phone repeatedly; in another part of Gaza his father was dying from a lack of medication.
Caught up in secondary strikes, or lost among the chaos of the war’s height, Shamikh says the agony of knowing his brother and his family are likely dead is compounded by not having a definitive answer on what happened to them.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says the death toll in Gaza is 47,354, with more than 111,000 people injured since 7 October 2023, when Hamas-led fighters killed more then 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages.
In addition, Shamikh has little faith that the current fragile ceasefire can hold, and the dynamics of a new Trump administration, he says, make a precarious future even more uncertain.
