They've been searching every day for a 5-year-old girl. Her remains may be under rubble

It was early in the morning when Mu’ayyad Ajjour and his neighbour Mohamed Zaida set up for the day’s search in Gaza City. Since the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began in October, the two have been looking for the remains of Ajjour’s five-year-old cousin, Masa, under the rubble of the building in which she and family were sheltering.

Ajjour, 37, tied ropes on the handles of a black mixing dish while Zaida, 17, crawled into a deep chasm in the rubble that he had dug. The meagre tools they had at hand were fashioned into a pulley system. This had become their routine: Zaida would pull the bowl down the tunnel on the rope toward him, fill it with debris, then call to Ajjour to pull it out and sift through it using a fan cover.

The air was silent, save for the sounds of the bowl