Two Weeks of Searching Beneath a Flattened Block
Gaza City held funeral processions on Tuesday for the bodies of 112 people from the Abu Shariya and al-Husseiniya families, in what was described as the largest mass funeral the Strip has seen since the war began, and one of the largest in Palestinian history. The bodies were recovered from beneath the rubble of a residential block in the Sabra neighborhood, south of Gaza City, that Israeli forces had completely destroyed. According to Gaza’s Civil Defense, the total number of victims from the two families at that single location reached 308 people, killed or missing, but search teams were able to recover only 112 sets of remains, following roughly two weeks of search operations totaling around 136 hours of fieldwork.
Forty Children Among the Dead, Dozens Still Missing
Among the 112 recovered were 40 children, 38 women, and 7 people with disabilities, according to Civil Defense figures, while dozens of others from the two families remain listed as missing beneath the rubble or were never identifiable due to the intensity of the explosions that leveled the block. Funeral processions drew large crowds of mourners, with dozens of young men carrying the wrapped remains of the victims in a long line, laying them side by side so that prayers could be held over all of them together before burial. Early attempts to recover the bodies had failed for months, hampered by the severity of the strike and Gaza’s near-total lack of the heavy equipment needed to search through the wreckage; only recently were Civil Defense teams able to reach the remains, working with limited resources under extremely difficult field conditions.
The scale of loss from a single strike on one residential block has made the case one of the most devastating documented so far in the war, illustrating how strikes on populated residential squares have repeatedly wiped out entire extended families in a single moment. As mourners gathered under a heavy atmosphere of grief across the city, search and recovery operations continued elsewhere in Gaza, with local authorities saying thousands of people remain missing beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings in other parts of the Strip.