The human cost of not knowing: Families search for missing loved ones with the support of the ICRC

"The least I can do is keep searching – the story has to have an ending." 

Adib has spent years trying to find out what happened to his grandfather, who went missing during Lebanon's 1975 civil war. His search is far from unusual. Around the world, armed conflict, violence, disasters and migration separate families every day, leaving many without any word on whether a loved one is alive or dead. This unresolved grief, sometimes called "ambiguous loss," can last for decades, and it often comes with financial and legal hardship as well as emotional pain.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has worked on this issue for more than 160 years. Its Central Tracing Agency (CTA), established under the Geneva Conventions, searches for missing people, restores contact between separated families and helps ensure the dead are treated with dignity. The CTA coordinates the Family Links Network, a partnership with 191 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies that reaches into conflict zones, detention centres, refugee camps and border areas most organisations cannot access.

The scale of this work is significant. In 2025, the ICRC and its partners registered 178,329 new tracing requests and clarified the fate of 28,693 people. By the end of the year, 409,855 cases remained open, including more than 42,000 who went missing as children. The Family Links Network facilitated over 1.4 million phone and video calls between separated relatives, and ICRC-supported teams recovered 631 sets of human remains, working to identify them and return them to families.

The ICRC's role goes beyond individual cases. It reminds parties to conflict of their legal obligation to prevent disappearances and to account for those who go missing, supports states in building national mechanisms to search for the missing, and trains forensic specialists to manage human remains with dignity. As co-founder of the Global Alliance for the Missing with the Swiss government, the ICRC also works at a diplomatic level to keep this issue on the international agenda.

For families, the search is rarely quick. Cases can take years, sometimes generations, to resolve. But as the ICRC's Director-General Pierre Krähenbühl notes, every family affected deserves clarity, closure and dignity — and unresolved cases leave scars that extend well beyond the individuals directly involved, shaping communities for years to come.