There has been no news of Mohammad el Sharif, who is married with three children, since he was lifted while trying to move his young family to a “safer” part of the stricken region.
Along with other residents, the family were walking westwards from Gaza City when soldiers stopped them at a checkpoint, separated the women and children on one side of the road, put the men on the other, then took all the men away.
“We are desperately worried about him as we think he has been detained and interrogated,” said Jane Salmonson, director of Firefly International, which supports children affected by the ravages of war.
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His wife, Alaa, and the three little boys are starving and homeless and have no idea where he is.
“I am told he is one of an estimated 20,000 men who have disappeared with no further trace from Gaza.”
El Sharif was the director of a child mental health clinic in Gaza which was bombed after the region’s invasion by Israel in response to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
Despite being displaced several times, he had managed to keep contact with Firefly staff until he was picked up by the IDF on November 27.
El Sharif has no links with Hamas and can be seen with his three sons in a heart-breaking video made more than a year ago in which he pleads for an end to the violence.
There is also a clip on YouTube of the valuable work the centre carried out before it was bombed.
Salmonson told the Sunday National it was impossible to say how many of the children depicted singing, dancing, playing and laughing in the video are now still alive or uninjured.
Unable to currently continue the work in Gaza, Firefly International is now supporting a project in Cairo, teaching around 300 children of refugee families from Gaza.
The project was set up by Egyptian volunteers who wanted to help their Palestinian neighbours. An estimated 100,000 Palestinians have fled to Cairo since Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
“It is just a drop in the bucket because there are probably about 60,000 Palestinian children from Gaza in Cairo but at least it’s something,” said Salmonson. “It’s so important to keep up their education.”