Families bury 112 recovered three years after Israeli strikes on Gaza

Palestinians on Tuesday buried 112 members of a single clan martyred in Israeli air strikes in November 2023, after their remains were recovered from beneath the rubble last month.

Relatives gathered in Gaza City to bid a final farewell to their loved ones, whose bodies lay in rows draped in Palestinian flags, MEE reported.

For many, it was a moment of both relief and renewed grief after nearly 1,000 days of waiting to recover the bodies of their relatives.

The strike on the Sabra neighborhood was one of the deadliest single-strike casualty events of the two-year genocide. Israeli warplanes flattened an entire residential block where hundreds of people had been living and sheltering. More than 300 people were killed, including 44 children, 37 women and more than 10 people with disabilities.

Most remained buried beneath the collapsed buildings.

Efforts to recover bodies from the rubble were halted in the early months of the war because search-and-rescue teams lacked the heavy equipment needed for the operation, which had been destroyed or blocked from entering Gaza by Israel.

Civil Defense crews resumed searching the site on 14 July using limited and inadequate equipment.

Officials said the force of the explosions had scattered human remains, making the recovery operation even more difficult.

By 1 August, crews had recovered the remains of 112 people, with more victims still believed to be buried beneath the debris.

"We worked for 17 days to recover the bodies in extremely difficult conditions. In the end, we managed to recover the remains of 112 people," Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip, told MEE.

"Thousands of people are still buried beneath the rubble, while their families continue to grieve and plead for the means to recover them."