Palestinian families have waited years for rescue teams to be able to recover the remains of relatives killed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Palestinians held a mass funeral on 6 September for around 100 victims of Israel’s genocide whose remains were recently recovered from beneath the rubble of destroyed homes in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighborhood.
Civil Defense crews spent days recovering the dead, which included 70 children, largely by hand amid severe equipment shortages and ongoing restrictions.
Among them were 55 peoplerecovered from a single family home after a three-day operation by rescuers. Israel struck the home of the Malka family on 19 November 2023, where 60 members of the family were sheltering.
Families have gathered for the funeral nearly three years later, laying the victims to rest amid candles, flowers, and Palestinian flags, finally bringing relatives a measure of closure.
Civil Defense official Colonel Mohammad Abu Dan, who is overseeing the recovery operation, said his teams face difficulties in retrieving the bodies of the victims due to a shortage of heavy machinery and equipment, which Israel has refused to allow into the strip.
He appealed to international humanitarian organizations for assistance so more bodies can be recovered from destroyed buildings across Gaza.
The operation in Al-Zaytoun is part of the “Recovery of Martyrs’ Bodies” project, in which rescuers have devoted 800 working hours to search for an estimated 1,072 people missing under the rubble of 147 destroyed homes across Gaza City and the northern and central governorates.
Gaza civil defense teams began a separate operation on Saturday to clear rubble from under the Engineers’ Tower in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
The remains of roughly 150 Palestinians are believed to be buried at the site after an Israeli strike destroyed the building with four munitions nearly three years ago.
‘Israeli’ Occupation Troops Clear 10 Million Tons of Rubble in Gaza To ‘Erase Evidence’ of Genocide
The Abusaeid family lost 23 people, including 12 children, in the 31 October 2023 attack.
One member of the family, Eman, had spoken to National Public Radio (NPR) about the situation in Gaza in the weeks before she was killed.
In her last message to NPR, Eman said there were no words to describe what they were experiencing while under Israeli bombing.
“Gaza is bleeding,” she wrote.
At a news conference in front of the collapsed tower on Saturday, Nuseirat municipality head Nabil al-Salhi said the operation was not only about clearing debris but about recovering bodies so that relatives could bury their dead with dignity.
A similar mass funeral was held on 20 August for at least 50 Palestinians whose bodies were retrieved from the rubble in Gaza City.
The bodies were recovered from the site of Israeli airstrikes in the early months of the war in the neighborhoods of Tal al-Hawa, Al-Zaytoun, Sabra, Sheikh Radwan and Al-Shati.
Among the victims were members of the Al-Sawafiri, Al-Batniji and Gharbiya families.
Thousands of Palestinians held a separate mass funeral in Gaza City on 4 August for 112 people whose remains were recovered from a residential block destroyed by Israeli attacks in November 2023.
The dead belonged to the Abu Sharia and Al-Hasayna clans, who had been sheltering in a block of homes in the Sabra neighborhood.
Hundreds of family members were living there when Israeli warplanes leveled the site, killing 308 people, including 44 children and 37 women.
As Palestinians continue to search for their missing loved ones, Israeli occupation forces have been conducting an organized operation to clear the rubble from neighborhoods it destroyed in Gaza, erasing crucial evidence of genocide and the remains of victims still unaccounted for under the rubble, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported on 3 August.
According to the Palestinian rights group, the Israeli military and civilian contractors have crushed and removed 10 million tons of rubble from their original sites within the areas of Gaza under Israeli occupation and control.
The removal of rubble is in preparation for Israel to build settlements in Gaza for Israeli Jews.
“This process is inseparable from Israeli settler colonialism, which involves uprooting Palestinians, erasing signs of their presence, and redefining the land without them.”
Since the beginning of its genocide in Gaza, Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority women and children. Some estimates have placed the toll in the hundreds of thousands. An estimated 9,500 bodies remain buried under the rubble of their destroyed homes in Gaza.
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