Nineteen bodies have been recovered from beneath the rubble of a residential building that collapsed in an Israeli strike in Gaza City, most of them women and children, Gaza’s Civil Defence authority said in a statement.
The recovery operation, which ended at the building on Saturday, is the latest example of the long, slow effort to find the dead buried under Gaza’s rubble. People are digging by hand, though clearing collapsed concrete needs heavy equipment, and the lack of it is severely hampering recovery work.
Mohammad Abu Dan, who is supervising the operation, said recovery work had been declared complete at the “Karam” building in western Gaza City after a four-day search. He said specialised medical staff and Civil Defence rescue teams would now move to another site in Gaza City and begin searching there.
Gaza Civil Defence officials have repeatedly said that, without heavy equipment to move the huge slabs of concrete from buildings brought down by Israeli strikes, rescuers must rely on basic tools and hard physical labour.
According to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 8,000 people across the territory are still missing and are believed to be buried under rubble. By the ministry’s latest count, at least 1,254 people have been killed and 4,121 injured in Israeli attacks since a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas took effect on 11 October last year, and 804 bodies have been recovered from the rubble over the same period. Since the conflict began in October 2023, more than 73,300 people have been killed and more than 174,000 injured in Gaza, the ministry says. BD Global Times could not independently verify the figures.
In Gaza City on Tuesday, a mass funeral was held for 112 members of the Abu Shariya and al-Hasaina families, whose bodies had been recovered from the rubble of a residential building in the Sabra area that was destroyed in an Israeli strike in November 2023. The 19 bodies were recovered from another building after that funeral.
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