Nearly Three Years Under the Rubble, Gaza Buries 112 Victims
Latest news on WhatsApp أجدد الأخبار على واتساب
Hundreds of Palestinians gathered in Gaza City on Tuesday, August 4, 2026, for a mass funeral after the remains of 112 people were recovered from the rubble of a residential block destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023.
The bodies, wrapped in Palestinian flags, were placed in rows near the ruined buildings before mourners performed funeral prayers and carried them on stretchers through a narrow street to a nearby cemetery.
Families gathered around photographs of the victims as flower petals were scattered over the bodies in one of Gaza’s largest recent mass funerals.
Gaza’s Civil Defense said rescue teams spent 136 hours digging through the rubble. The recovered victims included 40 children, while another 157 people from the same site remain missing, according to the agency.
The November 22, 2023, airstrike flattened a residential block in Gaza City’s Sabra neighbourhood and killed more than 300 people, according to The Associated Press.
Only around 40 bodies were recovered immediately after the attack because of the intensity of the fighting, the scale of the destruction and the lack of heavy rescue equipment.
Most of those buried on Tuesday belonged to the Hassayna and Abu Sharia families, and many were related to one another.
For their relatives, the suffering did not end with the attack. Families spent nearly three years waiting for confirmation, a burial place and an answer about those who had disappeared beneath the destroyed homes.
A fragile ceasefire that took effect last October has allowed rescue teams to reach some devastated areas and resume searches for people still buried under the rubble.
Gaza’s Health Ministry says relatives have reported around 7,400 people missing, although officials believe the real number may be higher because entire families were killed in some attacks, leaving no surviving relative to file a report.
The funeral highlights a continuing part of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. For thousands of families, the war has not ended with a reduction in large-scale fighting. Recovering, identifying and burying the dead remains a daily struggle amid destroyed infrastructure and shortages of equipment.
As mediators debate the ceasefire and reconstruction, many families continue to seek something more immediate: the remains of their loved ones, certainty about their fate and a grave carrying their names.
