RismadarVoice Reporters, August 5, 2026
Thousands of mourners gathered in Gaza City on Tuesday for a mass funeral for 112 members of the Abu Shreia and al-Hassaina families whose remains were recovered from beneath the rubble nearly three years after an Israeli air attack.
The funeral, held in the Sabra neighbourhood, was described as the largest mass funeral in Gaza since the war began in 2023.
For relatives, the ceremony brought a painful end to years of uncertainty over the fate of their loved ones.
Lara Abu Shreia, 39, said she could barely sleep the night before the funeral as memories of her family members returned.
“Today felt like the first day I lost them,” she said. “It was a renewed grief, saying goodbye to them this way.”
Lara lost 14 close relatives in the November 22, 2023, attack, including her mother, Nawal, eight siblings and several nieces and nephews.
At the time of the attack, Lara, her husband and their five children had been displaced to southern Gaza following an evacuation order. Several of her relatives, however, remained in Sabra.
She said she had repeatedly tried to contact her family after hearing that the area had been struck, but severe communication disruptions made it difficult to establish what had happened.
Eventually, her husband received news that the family compound had been hit and that those inside were trapped beneath the rubble.
“I kept telling myself maybe they were playing a trick on me. Maybe someone was hiding. Maybe I will find someone we didn’t know about,” Lara recalled.
When she returned to the area in January 2025, she found only the remains of the destroyed buildings.
112 bodies recovered
Palestinian Civil Defence teams began recovering human remains from the destroyed homes in Sabra weeks before the funeral after years of limited access and difficult search operations.
Of the 153 people believed to have been missing from the two families, 112 sets of remains were recovered.
Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defence, said more than 8,000 bodies were estimated to remain beneath destroyed buildings across Gaza.
He described Tuesday’s ceremony as unprecedented.
“Today, 112 martyrs are being buried in one funeral for the first time in the history of the Palestinian cause,” Basal said.
He said recovery efforts remained severely constrained by the scale of destruction and the lack of appropriate equipment.
According to Basal, some remains may never be recovered or identified because bodies have been scattered, destroyed or reduced to fragments beneath collapsed structures.
‘They were ordinary people’
Ali Abu Shreia, a 50-year-old relative of Lara, also lost two brothers and their entire families in the attack.
He said he was in southern Gaza when reports began arriving that homes in the family’s neighbourhood were being hit one after another.
“I lost my two brothers – Ahmad, 51; and Moeen, 53 – and their entire families – wives and kids,” he said.
Ali said members of the families moved between homes seeking safety before eventually gathering at the residence of Mufeed al-Hassaina, a former Palestinian minister of public works and housing.
He said the victims were ordinary civilians, including business owners, traders and people active in their communities.
“Seven families were completely erased from the civil registry,” he said.
At the funeral, men, elderly relatives and children gathered around the recovered remains as the procession began.
Women watching from nearby balconies cried and scattered flowers as the remains were carried away.
For Lara, the funeral finally allowed her to say goodbye after nearly three years of uncertainty.
The ceremony offered little sense of closure.
“I wanted to hug the bag,” she said. “I wanted to hug whatever remained of them.”
