Key facts
- 112 bodies of the Al-Hassayna clan were recovered and buried following Israeli airstrikes in November 2023.
- The strike flattened an entire residential block in Gaza City, killing an estimated 308 family members.
- 157 bodies remain missing.
- Recovery efforts took 17 days.
- The strike occurred on November 22, 2023.
Mourners gathered in central Gaza for a mass funeral for 112 people, including 40 children, who were killed in November 2023 in one of the deadliest Israeli strikes of the Gaza war. Their bodies could not be recovered until now because of ongoing Israeli strikes, though the pace has slowed since the October ceasefire.
Hundreds of people gathered around more than 100 coffins wrapped in Palestinian flags in Deir al-Balah. Mourners prayed for the victims before carrying the bodies through rubble-lined streets and past destroyed buildings for burial in a nearby cemetery. The victims were among over 300 people killed on November 22, 2023, when Israeli warplanes demolished a residential block in Gaza City. The bodies of only about 40 people could be recovered initially by those at the scene.
Last weekend, Gaza’s civil defence dug through the levelled apartment block and recovered the remains of a further 112 victims. It stated that 157 people were still missing after the attack. The ceasefire established in October has allowed first responders to dig through rubble where thousands of remains are still buried across the territory.
Zaher al-Waheidi, head of the Gaza health ministry’s records department, told the Associated Press that at least 7,400 people have been reported by relatives as still buried under the rubble, adding that the true number was likely thousands higher as some strikes had killed entire families.
A UN commission, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. In June, a UN commission found that Israel was continuing to commit genocide in Gaza and that its security forces “deliberately targeted and killed” Palestinian children.
At least 26 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes over the weekend, despite the announcement of a deal intended to solidify the second phase of the October ceasefire. These killings occurred days after US president Donald Trump hailed the latest deal as a “historic agreement”.
More than 73,000 people in Gaza have been killed by Israel since October 7, 2023, including over 1,250 people since the October ceasefire. Israel launched the war in Gaza after a Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which saw around 1,200 people killed and 251 taken hostage. Five Israeli soldiers have been killed since the October ceasefire.
Ceasefire talks intended to move the agreement into a second phase have largely stalled. Senior Hamas officials stated that the group’s disarmament is conditional on Israel withdrawing from the strip, while Israel said it had “serious security concerns” about last week’s agreement. Most of the Gaza Strip remains in ruins, with the vast majority of its 2 million population displaced and living through a humanitarian crisis in unsanitary, overcrowded tent cities.