Palestinians in Gaza City continued their mass funerals on Thursday, following the dozens of burials on Tuesday in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Today’s mass funeral saw another 105 victims of an Israeli attack buried in Martyrs Cemetery.
The slain in this case were killed in a flurry of Israeli attacks on Yarmouk Square neighborhood on October 25, 2023. The enormous number of attacks leveled a seven-storey apartment building as well as multiple residential buildings surrounding it, killing hundreds of civilians.
The slain in this particular series of attacks included a large number of internally displaced civilians who were sheltering in the seven-storey al-Taj 3 Building. The bodies were only finally recovered recently, which has led to multiple mass funerals of this type.
Mourners attend a mass funeral for Palestinians whose bodies were recovered from the rubble of a residential building hit in an Israeli strike in October 2023, according to the Civil Defence, in Gaza City October 1, 2026. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Today’s funeral is doubtless not the final one. A number of bodies were recovered in the latest searches, but the Gaza Health Ministry has suggested thousands more yet remain beneath the rubble, and Gaza Civil Defense said that a full recovery is likely to take years.
The site of the al-Taj residential towers massacre remains a substantial site for recovery operations, with the Egyptian Civil Defense participating in the most recent operations. One person present at the funeral, Osama Sharaf, reported losing 37 family members in the course of the massacre, and while some had been recovered previously, another 16, including his mother, father and siblings, were only finally recovered now, years after the fact.
Different attendees put the final toll of that specific series of strikes three years ago between 300 and 450 killed, though the sheer number of displaced civilians added to the residential site along with enormous numbers of women, children and the elderly makes it almost impossible to truly estimate the scale of loss.
Civil Defense have reported 630 recovered across Gaza, with an estimated total of 8,000 still buried. The families at today’s funeral urged the provision of heavy equipment to recover the bodies in the more timely fashion.
Legal expert Mahmoud Mahran suggested the large number of civilian bodies recovered from an attack on a plainly residential location could serve as further evidence in the ICJ for the violation of international law by the Israeli military.
The Geneva Conventions explicitly criminalize indiscriminate attacks on residential areas, and the recovery of such an enormous number of civilian bodies only strengthens the case for the illegality of what happened in October 2023. Mahran also suggested that the long delay in recovering the bodies added further questions surrounding humanitarian law.
