Gaza City: Palestinians are preparing to bury the remains of 105 people killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza City that took place in October 2023. The funeral procession, involving family members, will carry coffins to the Sheikh Radwan cemetery, northwest of Gaza City.
The victims died when a series of Israeli air strikes, involving at least 20 bombs, levelled the seven-storey Al Taj 3 building and destroyed several other residential buildings in the Yarmouk Square neighbourhood on the afternoon of October 25, 2023.
Gaza’s General Directorate of Civil Defence announced the burial arrangements. The recovery operation was carried out in coordination with an Egyptian committee.
Al Jazeera correspondent Ibrahim Khalili, reporting from Gaza City, described the recovery operation as the fifth largest of its kind since Israel launched its war against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, measured by the number of bodies recovered.
Civil defence operations director Abdul al-Majdalawi explained why the bodies remained unrecovered for so long. “It had been impossible to reach the bodies at the time of the attack,” he said. “Bulldozers, excavators and other heavy machinery used by civil defence teams in Gaza were directly and deliberately targeted.”
The scale of loss for individual families is staggering. Osama Sharaf lost 37 members of his family in the attack. “We recovered some of them at the beginning of the war, and today 16 more were recovered, including my father, my mother, and all of my siblings. My sister’s son was also there with them,” he said.
The burial comes nearly three years after the deadly strikes, a reflection of the extreme conditions faced by civil defence teams throughout the conflict.
