Three years after the start of the war in Gaza, thousands of families still do not know what happened to their loved ones. Some vanished beneath buildings bombed by Israel; others remain unaccounted for. The destruction of territory, the displacement of millions of people and the lack of resources to recover and identify remains make it increasingly difficult to reconstruct their stories. The longer time goes by, the greater the risk of losing the evidence that could lead to them.

According to estimates from the Palestinian National Team for Monitoring Missing Persons, more than 10,000 people are missing in the Gaza Strip, and it is believed that over 8,000 remain under the rubble. The team has individually documented more than 9,500 cases, including 4,700 women and children.

For Omar Al‑Assouli, strategic adviser to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Palestine, the experience of Colombia’s Unit for the Search for Persons Declared Missing (UBPD) provides an answer—drawn from the Colombian reality—to the question of how to launch searches for missing people without waiting for the conflict to end.

“The first time we talked about this issue it was almost impossible to start the work, because people always think you have to end the war or have a peace agreement before starting the process of searching for the missing. But contact with the UBPD gave us the key, which is that we have a humanitarian approach. That gave us a lot of motivation to start, without making the mistake of waiting for the peace process or for transitional justice,” Al‑Assouli says from Bogotá, where he is taking part in an international symposium organized by the Search Unit.

In Colombia, that unit was born out of the 2016 Peace Agreement as a humanitarian, extrajudicial entity tasked with searching for people who disappeared in the context of the armed conflict. It includes those who may still be alive and those who died, whose remains must be recovered, identified and returned to their families. Because it does not seek to determine criminal responsibility, the search can advance without relying on judicial processes.

That is precisely something that could work in Gaza, Al‑Assouli says. “People are suffering and every day counts. They do not need a process of transitional justice now, nor do they need to be waiting for one; they do not need to see the people who made their relatives disappear go to prison. What they are seeking immediately is the truth and information about them,” he says.

Contact with the Colombian experience has also led him to consider how to centralize all available information, as the UBPD does. He explains that families can hand the same data to different organizations and agencies, a repetition that wears on those who are searching and increases the risk that information becomes scattered. “We think it is very important to have a comprehensive information‑collection system. We can collect the data that NGOs, international organizations or the Red Cross already have,” he explains.

Another point of convergence between the Palestinian and Colombian experiences is a collective dimension to the search. In Colombia, the UBPD has built on and strengthened the work of families and searchers—mostly women, who have their own protection and accompaniment law—social organizations, specialists and professionals from different disciplines. In Gaza, Al‑Assouli says, families are part of that work, although the conditions make it harder. The challenge is for that search to have coordination, technical support and mechanisms to preserve the information.

The obstacles to finding the missing in Gaza

The challenges, however, go further. Al‑Assouli points out that a significant portion of the territory is outside the control of Palestinian authorities and that, even in places where access is possible, resources to examine bodies are lacking. Searches take place amid destruction that makes both recovering remains and reconstructing the circumstances of disappearance difficult.

“In areas under Palestinian control, search methods are very primitive. There are no, for example, large excavators,” he says. The critical scenario is compounded by a shortage of DNA tests and forensic laboratories. In some centers samples are kept and remains are registered as unidentified, awaiting conditions that would allow testing.

But while time there may sound like hope, it also worsens the shortages. Bodies that remain beneath destroyed buildings can deteriorate. Some of those recovered have been in a condition that requires expertise in forensic anthropology and other disciplines. Those technical skills are scarce on the ground.

Displacement adds another difficulty. Around two and a half million people lived in Gaza, and about two million of them have had to flee their homes. Reconstructing who lived in each building, who was there when it was destroyed and who has been missing since then is far harder given those movements. “It is another source of information that we do not have,” the expert says.

While institutions try to organize the search, some families return to places they can enter and dig with their own hands or rudimentary tools. They try to find any evidence that would let them know whether their relatives are still there and recover the bodies to bury them.

The expert describes that search as a response to uncertainty, one that the Colombian experience shows could be reduced with organization and resources, even without waiting for all conditions to be adequate.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition

Paulina Montesinos met a man named Baruc, an Italian in his thirties with an attractive profile, on the dating app Bumble. After they matched, their story moved quickly: they chatted for days, went out on a few dates and soon he started showing strong affection and lavish gestures. “I’ve met the perfect man,” she thought. He also presented himself as vulnerable, neurodivergent and with an intense past that aroused deep empathy in Montesinos.

It was April 2024 and six months later Baruc had vanished with roughly 170,000 pesos ($9,000) he had scammed from her. Since then Montesinos has pursued a legal battle that, barely two years on, is beginning to take shape with a hearing this Friday, after the State of Mexico Prosecutor’s Office managed to locate Alfonso N. That is the real identity of the man who hid behind the names Ezra, Luca and Lazlo on Bumble and Tinder and who defrauded at least 15 women over a period of 10 years.

The Baruc she met had a well-crafted story. On early dates he told Montesinos about his work as an art appraiser and his life abroad. He shared more intimate details, saying his family treated him badly and that his mother had died. “At that moment I felt enormous empathy. The story of a deceased mother worked as the first emotional hook that made me drop my guard and feel vulnerable to his situation,” says the 39-year-old from the State of Mexico. “I received a very long message, like a scroll, in which he told me his whole life and his supposed story that his parents never loved him, abandoned him, and he described himself as neurodivergent, which justified certain controlling behaviors such as asking me not to wear perfume or lipstick so as not to upset him,” she tells this newspaper in a phone interview.

Once she felt “completely hooked,” requests for help disguised as financial crises began. “First he asked me to check prices for Apple devices because supposedly his were failing. Then he said he needed money for a project in Mexico City with a friend,” she explains. He threatened that those problems could make him leave the country. “I told him that if things were that bad we could leave it at that. Then he ‘turned it around,’ making me feel guilty for not helping him in his worst moment,” she says. Guilt worked, and Montesinos gave in: “I went to buy Apple devices like iPads, an Apple Watch, an Apple Pencil and headphones using credit cards borrowed from my mother, and I also gave him my own money.”

That same night she received a message implying he and his friend had been kidnapped and she spent the night awake trying to contact him. “The next day reality set in, and I felt the emptiness of knowing I had lost my money,” she says.

Montesinos was a victim of so-called romance scam, in which a scammer builds an online romantic relationship with a victim and wins their trust in order to obtain money. According to cybercrime police, 60% of reports received nationwide are filed by women aged 25 to 40. Most incidents involve this type of fraud. “I spent 10 whole days in a deep depression, locked up, not wanting to eat and crying inconsolably.” She had to sell her car to pay off the debt, but her family, which has “a culture of reporting crimes,” pushed her to go to the prosecutor’s office.

Some time later she found Facebook groups where women share similar experiences and warn about scammers they meet on those apps. “After I posted my case, a girl messaged me saying she was dating the same guy,” she says. Over time about 15 more women came forward. Together they discovered the identity of the man who had defrauded them: Alfonso N, a Mexican national, married, father of one, who lies about his age and has spent a decade scamming women using the same method. In one case he had taken 500,000 pesos (over $26,000) from a single woman. It was these women who traced him until they found his real name and address. Then the threats began. “They told me they were watching me, that they were outside my house. I was very scared; I didn’t want to leave,” Montesinos says.

Armed with that information, she pressured the prosecutor’s office to move the investigation forward. After being turned away by five public prosecutors and enduring two and a half years of struggle, Alfonso N has now been located and the other victims have filed their own complaints. Along the way, the scammer’s lawyer offered Montesinos 100,000 pesos ($5,300) to drop the complaint. When she refused, he threatened: “Well, he will get away.” But the process continues with precautionary measures requiring Alfonso to sign in periodically, and initial hearings have taken place. This Friday is the next one.

In the reporting process she also encountered another reality she “did not expect to find”: revictimization and public scrutiny after telling her story to the media. “I have had to rebuild myself little by little, restore my finances. I accept my responsibility, but I did my part by reporting and warning others so they don’t go through the same thing. Today I just want to get my life back and stop being Paulina, the scammed woman,” she concludes.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition