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.
