Gaza City Holds Mass Funeral for 112 Bodies Pulled From Rubble of 2023 Israeli Strike

Gaza City held what's being described as the largest mass funeral of the war Tuesday, burying 112 people killed in an Israeli strike on a residential block nearly three years ago, according to the BBC.

The victims belonged to two extended families, the Abu Sharia and Hassayna clans. Forty were children. Thirty-eight were women. Seven had disabilities, according to the BBC's reporting.

They died on November 22, 2023, when Israel struck a multi-story residential building in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City. That was six weeks after the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.

The bodies sat under rubble for close to three years until a two-week recovery operation finally pulled them out. Gaza's Civil Defense, which operates under the Hamas-run interior ministry, led the dig with support from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

What the recovery actually took

Civil Defense spokesman Mohammed Basel described the scale of the building's collapse to the BBC during an earlier visit: "This multi-storey building has been levelled. There were maybe more than 180 civilians inside. Most of them, around 90%, were killed."

The ICRC's role was logistical, not just symbolic. Spokesperson Patrick Griffiths told the BBC his organization supplied "the gloves, shovels, protective equipment and body bags" the Civil Defense crews used, plus training on how to handle recovery work safely and with dignity. The ICRC also rented two of the only excavators available in Gaza for the job, for hundreds of hours.

Griffiths didn't sugarcoat what this closure means for families. "It's not an answer any family wants to receive, confirmation that your loved one has been killed," he said. "But it's essential towards them receiving closure and being able to mourn their loss in their own way."

The scene at the funeral

Footage from the funeral showed remains lined up in rows, each covered with a Palestinian flag, some accompanied by photos of the dead, before relatives carried them away for burial.

One mourner, Ali Abu Sharia, described the mixed emotions of finally being able to bury his relatives. "I think this is a feeling that was supposed to be felt, a feeling of pain, grief and loss," he said. "After we managed to retrieve them and bury them, perhaps we can be partially relieved despite the pain of loss and all we're still living through."

What's unresolved

The BBC reported it asked the Israel Defense Forces for information on what was targeted in the November 2023 strike and had not received a response as of publication. That leaves the core factual question—what military objective Israel was pursuing when it hit a building housing more than 180 civilians—unanswered.

Israel has said throughout the war that Hamas embeds fighters and infrastructure in residential areas, using civilian buildings as cover. This claim has been documented in some instances by independent reporting and disputed or unaddressed in others. Without an IDF response on this specific strike, there's no way to confirm or rule out whether that was a factor here.

The death toll figure cited by the BBC, at least 73,377 killed in Gaza since the war began, comes from the Hamas-run health ministry. The BBC notes the UN considers those figures reliable. The ministry operates under a governing authority that is also a party to the conflict. That doesn't make the number wrong, but readers should know the source.

What remains uncontested is the scale of what happened in Sabra: a nearly three-year gap between death and burial, a recovery effort that required rented excavators and imported protective equipment because Gaza's own resources were exhausted, and a family structure—two extended clans—essentially wiped out in a single strike.

No new Israeli military statement on the Sabra strike has been issued as of this reporting. The next concrete marker will be whether the IDF responds to the BBC's outstanding request, and whether that response identifies a specific target that justified the scale of destruction in a building housing well over 180 civilians.