‘He insisted we take him to the graves’: the Palestinian civilians coming home to catastrophe

Alaa Abu Zeid only discovered his wife and children had been killed after his release from an Israeli prison. His is a story repeated across Gaza

• ‘They don’t want them to know anything’: Gaza civilians held in Israel not told families had been killed

More than a year after his abduction by Israeli soldiers, the first thing Alaa Abu Zeid wanted to do on his return to Gaza was hold his wife and children. He didn’t know that Ali, his brother, would be the only person waiting when he arrived in Khan Younis earlier this month: Alaa’s wife, Hala, and all five of the couple’s children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike last summer.

Abu Zeid, 48, the headteacher of a primary school funded by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) in Bureij in central Gaza, was arrested along with dozens of other men when Israeli troops raided the school turned shelter in December 2023. He would never see his family again.