Gaza funeral held for 112 recovered, civil defence says

Hundreds of people attended a mass funeral in Gaza City on Tuesday for 112 people recovered from rubble, Gaza's civil defence said.

Rows of Palestinian flags were laid over remains at a cleared plot between buildings flattened by airstrikes. Gaza's civil defence said Israeli strikes in late 2023 killed the people whose remains were being buried.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said 44 of the bodies recovered during two weeks in July were those of children and that all belonged to the same extended family.

Mohammad Al-Mughayyir, director of operations for the civil defence, said crews worked for 17 days to recover the 112 bodies and remains from beneath the rubble. He said teams often had to dig through concrete and twisted steel with their bare hands.

The civil defence, which operates as a rescue force under Hamas authority, said much of the recovery work was carried out with two excavators rented by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Pat Griffiths, the ICRC spokesman in Jerusalem, confirmed that the organisation had hired two excavators from Gaza's private sector to assist in the operation.

Bassal said more than 8,000 bodies are still trapped under Gaza's rubble.

Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Militants also took 251 hostages to Gaza.

Israel's retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 people, according to the territory's health ministry, which operates under Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.

A ceasefire took hold in October, but progress on permanently ending the war has stalled. Israeli forces currently control nearly 70 percent of the territory, and near-daily airstrikes and artillery fire continue in Gaza despite the ceasefire. The health ministry says at least 1,252 Palestinians have been killed since the truce.

The Gaza Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, published in April by the World Bank, the European Union and the United Nations, estimated that 68 million tonnes of rubble from destroyed or damaged buildings are spread across the Gaza Strip. It said more than 60 percent of Gaza's population of 2.1 million lost their homes during the war.

Restrictions on media outlets and limited access in Gaza prevent AFP from independently verifying tolls or freely covering the violence there.