by Jason Ditz, antiwar.com
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.
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.