On a vacant stretch of Gaza City, hemmed in by buildings levelled in airstrikes, Palestinian flags lay in orderly rows above the remains of dozens of people awaiting burial.
Hundreds gathered for the funeral, as music played over loudspeakers at the site where Israeli strikes in late 2023 killed the 112 people whose remains were finally recovered, Gaza’s civil defence agency said.
Ahmed Abu Sharia, a member of the extended family, said the ceremony would bring relatives a measure of long-awaited closure.
“We came to mourn our martyrs, children, women and the elderly,” he said.
Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
The militants also seized 251 hostages and took them to Gaza.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 people, according to the territory’s health ministry, which operates under Hamas authority. The United Nations considers the ministry’s figures reliable.
A ceasefire took effect in October, but efforts to secure a permanent end to the war have stalled. Israeli forces currently control nearly 70% of Gaza.
Digging with bare hands
Civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said 44 of the bodies recovered over two weeks in July were children. All came from the same extended family.
“Our crews worked continuously for 17 days in an effort to recover these 112 bodies and remains from beneath the rubble,” said Mohammad Al-Mughayyir, the civil defence director of operations.
He said rescuers frequently had to “dig through concrete and twisted steel with their bare hands”.
“In some cases, complete skeletons remained intact, held together only by clothing.”
Mr Bassal said more than 8,000 bodies remained buried beneath Gaza’s rubble.
Men lined up on the sand in silence for prayer during the mass funeral
Two excavators
Gaza’s civil defence agency, which operates as a rescue force under Hamas authority, said much of the recovery effort was made possible by two excavators rented through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Pat Griffiths, an ICRC spokesman in Jerusalem, confirmed to AFP that the organisation had hired “two of the only excavators available for this work in Gaza” from private-sector operators in the territory.
Gaza’s civil defence agency and organisations including the ICRC have repeatedly complained that Israel, which controls all entry points into the Palestinian territory, has failed to permit sufficient construction equipment and machinery for recovering bodies.
Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire also continue to hit Gaza on an almost daily basis despite the ceasefire.
At least 1,252 Palestinians have been killed since the truce began, according to the territory’s health ministry.
At the mass funeral, described as one of the largest ever held in Gaza, men stood shoulder to shoulder on the sand for prayers.
The remains were placed on stretchers and draped in flags, while photographs were displayed for those who could be identified.
Mixed with rubble
A member of the Al-Husayneh family, which is related to those being buried, said he no longer expected the remaining bodies to be recovered.
“The rest of the victims’ bodies were vapourised, and their bones and flesh became mixed with the concrete rubble,” said the man, who declined to give his name because of security concerns.
“Why did Israel kill so many young children? There was nothing about them that could have justified targeting them.”
The Gaza Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, published in April by the World Bank, the EU and the UN, estimated that 68 million tonnes of rubble from destroyed or damaged buildings covered Gaza.
The report also said more than 60% of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents had lost their homes during the nearly three years since the war began.
Israel’s restrictions on media outlets and limited access to Gaza prevent AFP from independently verifying casualty figures or reporting freely on the violence there.
