Gaza Families Prepare to Bury 105 Victims Recovered from 2023 Israeli Strike

Palestinian authorities in Gaza have announced that the remains of 105 people killed in a large-scale Israeli attack on Gaza City in October 2023 will be laid to rest, bringing a measure of closure to families who have waited nearly three years for the return of their loved ones.

According to the General Directorate of Civil Defence, coffins holding the recovered remains will be carried in a funeral procession on Thursday that will include relatives of the deceased. The burial is scheduled to take place at the Sheikh Radwan cemetery, located northwest of Gaza City.

The victims lost their lives in a series of Israeli air strikes on the afternoon of October 25, 2023, when at least 20 bombs were dropped on the Yarmouk Square neighbourhood. The bombardment levelled the seven-storey Al Taj 3 building and reduced several other residential structures to rubble, trapping an unknown number of people beneath the debris.

Gaza's civil defence agency said the recovery operation was conducted in coordination with an Egyptian committee, an arrangement that reflects the role regional mediators have played in facilitating access and logistical support during successive rounds of recovery work across the territory.

Al Jazeera correspondent Ibrahim Khalili, reporting from Gaza City, said the operation was the fifth largest of its kind since Israel launched what he described as a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, measured by the number of bodies retrieved. The scale of the effort underscores how many victims of the conflict's earliest and most intense bombardments remain unaccounted for.

Abdul al-Majdalawi, director of civil defence operations, said it had been "impossible" to reach the bodies at the time of the attack. He accused Israeli forces of deliberately targeting the heavy machinery that rescue teams rely on, saying bulldozers, excavators and other equipment used by civil defence teams in Gaza were directly and deliberately hit.

The destruction of that equipment severely hampered rescue efforts in the weeks and months after the strike, when survivors and emergency crews were forced to dig through collapsed concrete with limited tools and under continuing bombardment. The delay in recovering remains has left many families in a prolonged state of uncertainty, unable to conduct proper burial rites.

For some relatives, the recovery has brought both grief and a form of relief. Osama Sharaf said 37 members of his family were killed in the attack. He explained that some of the bodies had been retrieved at the beginning of the war, and that 16 more were recovered on Wednesday, including his father, his mother and all of his siblings, as well as his sister's son.

Sharaf's account illustrates the fragmented nature of recovery work in Gaza, where families often retrieve remains in stages as access to destroyed areas becomes possible. Each partial recovery forces relatives to relive the loss while also allowing them to move forward with religious obligations that require burial.

The Al Taj 3 building and the surrounding Yarmouk Square neighbourhood were among the many residential areas devastated during the opening phase of the war. The use of at least 20 bombs in a single afternoon strike suggests a level of firepower that would have made survival unlikely for those inside the targeted structures and extremely hazardous for anyone attempting to reach them.

International humanitarian law requires parties to a conflict to take constant care to spare civilians and civilian objects, and prohibits attacks that are indiscriminate or disproportionate. Critics have repeatedly raised concerns about whether strikes such as the one on Yarmouk Square met those standards, though accountability processes have remained largely stalled.

The funeral procession on Thursday is expected to draw family members and community residents, turning the cemetery into a site of collective mourning. Funerals in Gaza have often become occasions for public expressions of grief and anger, with mourners calling for an end to the violence and for those responsible for civilian deaths to be held accountable.

The recovery of these 105 remains also raises the broader question of how many other victims remain buried under the rubble of Gaza's destroyed neighbourhoods. Civil defence teams have frequently said that a lack of heavy equipment, fuel and safe access has prevented them from reaching many sites, leaving accurate casualty counts difficult to establish.

Because the remains were recovered in coordination with an Egyptian committee, the operation highlights the limited but critical role that regional actors have played in facilitating humanitarian work inside Gaza. Such coordination has often been necessary to secure access to areas that would otherwise be unreachable for local emergency services.

For families like the Sharafs, the burial marks the end of one chapter of loss but not of grief. Relatives who spent months searching for information about missing loved ones will now have a grave to visit, even as they continue to demand answers about the circumstances of the strike and about the fate of others still unaccounted for.

Thursday's procession will proceed from the southern areas of Gaza City toward the Sheikh Radwan cemetery, where the 105 coffins will be interred. For the families involved, the ceremony represents both a religious duty fulfilled and a painful reminder of the destruction that has reshaped their lives since October 2023.