Mass funeral held in Gaza for family killed during war

In a cleared plot of land between buildings flattened by airstrikes in Gaza City, row upon row of Palestinian flags were laid out neatly over the remains of dozens of people to be buried.

Hundreds of people attended the funeral ceremony, where music played from speakers at a site where Israeli strikes in late 2023 killed the 112 people now recovered from the rubble, Gaza's civil defence said.

Ahmed Abu Sharia, a member of the extended family of those being buried, said the funeral would at last provide closure for relatives.

"We came to mourn our martyrs, children, women and the elderly," he said.

"This is a funeral for the Palestinian people, because they are victims. People are under the rubble, and they did not fight or bear weapons," he added.

Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Militants also took 251 hostages 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 and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.

A ceasefire took hold in October, but progress on permanently ending the war has stalled, and Israeli forces currently control nearly 70% of the territory.

Digging with bare hands

Civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said 44 of the bodies recovered during two weeks in July were those of children, and all belonged to 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 Director of operations for the civil defence Mohammad Al-Mughayyir.

He added that teams often 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 that more than 8,000 bodies are still trapped under Gaza's rubble.

Two excavators

The civil defence, which operates as a rescue force under Hamas authority, said that much of the recovery work was carried out thanks to two excavators rented out by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

ICRC spokesman in Jerusalem Pat Griffiths, confirmed to AFP that his organisation had hired "two of the only excavators available for this work in Gaza" from the territory's private sector to assist in the operation.

Gaza's civil defence and organisations such as ICRC have long complained that Israel, which controls all entry points into the Palestinian territory, has not allowed in enough construction tools and machinery to carry out body recoveries.

Near-daily Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire also continue to rock Gaza despite the ceasefire.

At least 1,252 Palestinians have been killed since the truce, according to the territory's health ministry.

At the mass funeral, one of the largest ever organised in Gaza, men lined up on the sand in silence for prayer.

The remains were laid out on stretchers and covered with flags. There were photos for the deceased who could be identified.

Mixed with rubble

A member of the Al-Husayneh family, who are relatives of those to be buried, told AFP that he did not expect the remaining bodies to be found.

"The rest of the victims' bodies were vapourised, and their bones and flesh became mixed with the concrete rubble," said the man, who did not wish to share his name for security reasons.

"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 are spread across Gaza.

Over 60% of Gaza's population of 2.1 million lost their homes in the nearly three years since the war broke out, the report added.

Restrictions imposed on media outlets and limited access in Gaza by Israel prevent AFP from independently verifying tolls or freely covering the violence there.