Mass funeral held in Gaza for victims of 2023 Israeli strike

Mourners gathered in central Gaza on Tuesday for a mass funeral for 112 people, including 40 children, who were killed in 2023 in one of the deadliest Israeli strikes of the Gaza war.Their bodies could not be recovered until now because of Israel’s continuing strikes, which have slowed, though not halted, since the ceasefire in October.Hundreds of people gathered around more than 100 coffins wrapped in Palestinian flags and arranged in rows on the ground in Deir al-Balah. Mourners prayed for the victims before carrying the bodies through rubble-lined streets and past destroyed buildings for burial in a nearby cemetery.The victims had been among more than 300 people killed on 22 November 2023, when Israeli warplanes demolished a residential block in Gaza City. The bodies of only about 40 people could be recovered by people at the scene, who dug through smouldering rubble with their bare hands and basic tools.Last weekend, Gaza’s civil defence dug through the levelled apartment block and recovered the remains of a further 112 victims, including women and children. It said 157 people were still missing after the attack.The ceasefire that was established in October – which has not stopped Israeli bombing of Gaza – has allowed first responders to dig through the rubble where thousands of remains are still buried across the territory.Palestinians carry the bodies through the rubble-lined streets of Deir al-Balah for burial in a nearby cemetery. Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPAAt least 7,400 people have been reported by relatives as still buried under the rubble, Zaher al-Waheidi, head of the Gaza health ministry’s records department, told the Associated Press. He added that the true number was probably thousands higher because some strikes had killed entire families, leaving no loved ones to report them missing.A UN commission, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. In June, a UN commission found that Israel was continuing to commit genocide in Gaza and that its security forces “deliberately targeted and killed” Palestinian children.At least 26 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes over the weekend, despite the announcement of a deal intended to solidify the second phase of the October ceasefire. The killings happened just a few days after the US president, Donald Trump, hailed the latest deal – intended to lead to Hamas disarming and Israeli troops withdrawing from Gaza – as a “historic agreement”.More than 73,000 people in Gaza have been killed by Israel since 7 October 2023, including more than 1,250 people since the October ceasefire.Israel launched the war in Gaza after a Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 which saw around 1,200 people killed and 251 taken hostage. Five Israeli soldiers have been killed since the October ceasefire.Ceasefire talks intended to move the agreement into a second phase have largely stalled. Senior Hamas officials said that the group’s disarmament is conditional on Israel withdrawing from the strip. Israel said that it had “serious security concerns” about last week’s agreement.Most of the Gaza Strip remains in ruins, with the vast majority of its 2 million population displaced and living through a humanitarian crisis in unsanitary, overcrowded tent cities.