Palestinian mourners attend the funeral of members of the Abu Sharia and Al-Hassaina families, whose remains were recently recovered from the rubble of residential buildings in the al-Sabra neighbourhood which were struck by Israeli bombardments in November 2023, in Gaza City on August 4, 2026. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
Gaza: Palestinians in Gaza held Tuesday a solemn national funeral procession for the remains and bodies of 112 martyrs from a single family killed in an Israeli carnage carried out by the Israeli occupation army on Nov. 22, 2023, at the beginning of the war of annihilation against the enclave and its residents.
This macabre scene was one of the largest witnessed in Palestine in terms of the number of bodies and remains carried for burial, all of whom were killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a residential block inhabited by members of the Abu Sharia and Al-Hassaina families in Al-Sabra neighborhood, south of Gaza City.
The ceremony was attended by popular, community, and official delegations, along with thousands of Palestinians and Civil Defense personnel who took part in the recovery operations of the bodies and remains over the past several weeks.
In a scene that brought back to mind the magnitude of the massacre committed by the Israeli occupation against the family, funeral biers carrying the bodies and remains of the martyrs, draped in Palestinian flags, were lined up at the same site of the decimated residential block that had been targeted by the occupation forces.
Following the funeral prayers, the bodies and remains were laid to rest at the Al-Maamadani Cemetery in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City.
Gaza's Civil Defense personnel managed to recover only the bodies and remains of 112 martyrs from among the family members killed in the carnage.
They completed the recovery operations last Saturday after 136 hours of arduous work removing rubble and searching for victims, which continued for almost two weeks amid limited capabilities.
The Israeli bombardment of the family's residential block at the beginning of the war on Gaza erased its features almost entirely, reducing it to rubble and ashes.
The Israeli occupation forces prevented recovery operations from the day of the carnage, which resulted in the killing of 308 members of the family, their in-laws, and relatives, including the family's elder, elderly men, young men, 44 children under the age of 16, 37 women, and more than 10 persons with disabilities.
Talking to Qatar News Agency (QNA), Mahmoud Bassal, spokesperson for the Civil Defense Service, stated that the recovery operations were carried out using only one heavy machine that had been onsite due to the Israeli occupation's imposed ban on the entry of relief equipment and debris-removal machinery into the enclave.
Civil Defense personnel faced ghastly scenes during the recovery operations, as the bodies and remains had entirely decomposed, including those of children, women, men, and the elderly, Bassal explained.
He pointed out that some of the victims were identified through their clothing and personal belongings, such as the gold chains worn by women, adding that these martyrs were buried in a mass grave.
Bassal clamored for pressure on the part of international and humanitarian organizations to allow the access of essential equipment, enabling Civil Defense rescuers to continue recovering the bodies from underneath the rubble amid the enormous scale of devastation left behind by the war.
