On September 6, 2026, thousands of Palestinians gathered in Gaza City’s al-Zeitoun neighbourhood to lay to rest 100 people whose remains were pulled from the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli military strikes nearly three years prior. Among the victims recovered from the collapsed structures, 62 were children, a devastating toll that underscores the far-reaching human cost of the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip.
According to Gaza’s civil defence service, more than half of the deceased — 55 people — belonged to a single extended family, the Malakas, who were killed in an Israeli air raid on the neighbourhood in November 2023. The remaining remains were identified as members of four other local families: the Irahem, Qanbour, Balawi and Dahdouh. Al Jazeera’s on-the-ground reporting confirmed that no fully intact bodies were recovered from the strike site, with Israeli forces having repeatedly obstructed search and recovery operations in the area in the months after the attack.
Mourners, including grieving relatives and neighbouring residents, assembled outside the Imam al-Shafi Mosque to begin the funeral procession. Each set of remains was wrapped in a Palestinian flag, and crowds carried the caskets through neighbourhood streets to al-Maamadani cemetery in central Gaza City, where all 100 victims were interred in shared collective graves.
Palestinian civil defence teams have led incremental search efforts across Gaza to recover trapped remains in the years since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023, but the process has been severely hampered by systemic barriers. Israel has blocked most heavy rescue machinery from entering the besieged enclave, and much of the existing equipment available to Palestinian teams was destroyed in earlier Israeli strikes, leaving crews reliant on manual labour to sort through tonnes of collapsed concrete and debris.
Official data from Gaza’s health authorities puts the total Palestinian death toll from Israeli attacks across the territory at more than 73,650 since October 7, 2023. Thousands of additional bodies are still believed to be trapped beneath rubble across Gaza, with no clear path to full recovery under current conditions. Omar Nofal, head of Gaza’s government committee for missing persons, told Middle East Eye that roughly 6,000 people have been formally registered as missing since the war began, but he estimates the actual number of unaccounted-for people is closer to 15,000, most buried under destroyed residential and commercial structures.
This mass funeral is not an isolated event. Just one month earlier, in August 2026, Palestinians buried the recovered remains of 112 members of the Abu Sharia and al-Hasayna families, killed in another massive Israeli air strike on Gaza City’s Sabra neighbourhood in November 2023. That attack stands as one of the deadliest single strikes of the conflict, which has been labeled a genocide by multiple international human rights bodies. Israeli warplanes completely leveled an entire residential block where hundreds of clan members had been sheltering, killing more than 300 people including 44 children, 37 women and at least 10 people with disabilities. Most of the victims remained trapped under rubble for nearly three years, as recovery efforts were stalled from the start by the lack of heavy equipment — destroyed or blocked from entry by Israeli authorities.