On Tuesday, August 4, 2026, hundreds of mourners gathered in Deir al-Balah, a town in central Gaza, for a mass funeral. They were burying 112 Palestinians, including 40 children, whose bodies were finally pulled from the rubble of an apartment building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike back on November 22, 2023. The coffins, wrapped in Palestinian flags, were carried through streets still lined with broken concrete as thousands of people joined the procession The Guardian Al Jazeera.

The story begins with the broader war. On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza, led an attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. Israel responded with a heavy bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza. About six weeks into the war, on November 22, 2023, Israeli warplanes struck a residential block in Gaza City, killing more than 300 people. At the time, civilians could only dig out about 40 bodies using their bare hands and simple tools. The rest were trapped under collapsed buildings and could not be reached for over two years because fighting continued The Guardian.

A ceasefire — a formal agreement to stop fighting — took hold in October 2025. That created a chance for rescue workers to reach areas that had been too dangerous to enter. Last weekend, Gaza's civil defence, the local emergency rescue agency, dug through the destroyed apartment block and recovered the 112 bodies. The agency said 157 people from that same attack are still missing. The dead included members of the Hassayna and Abu Sharia families, which led Reuters to call the funeral the burial of "nearly a whole clan" The Guardian Reuters Al Jazeera. The BBC reported that most of the 112 killed were women and children BBC.

The ceasefire opened access to sites across Gaza, but the scale of what remains buried is enormous. Zaher al-Waheidi, who runs the records department at Gaza's health ministry, said at least 7,400 people have been reported by relatives as still trapped under rubble. He believes the real number is likely thousands higher, because some airstrikes killed entire families, meaning no one was left to report them missing The Guardian.

The ceasefire has also not stopped the violence completely. Over the weekend, at least 26 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes, even as a new deal was announced to strengthen the second phase of the ceasefire. Since the ceasefire began in October 2025, more than 1,250 Palestinians have been killed, bringing the total death toll in Gaza to more than 73,000 since October 7, 2023. Five Israeli soldiers have died during the same period The Guardian.

The political situation remains stuck. Senior Hamas officials said they would only give up their weapons if Israel withdraws from Gaza. Israel says it has serious security concerns about last week's agreement The Guardian.

Most of Gaza is in ruins. The vast majority of its 2 million residents have lost their homes and are living in overcrowded, unsanitary tent cities amid an ongoing humanitarian crisis The Guardian.

The funeral also comes at a time of growing international legal action. In June 2026, a United Nations commission found that Israel was continuing to commit genocide — the deliberate destruction of a people — in Gaza, and that its forces had deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, two major human rights organizations, have reached similar conclusions The Guardian.

The broader context here is that this ceasefire has worked more like a slowdown of violence than a true end to it. The October agreement made it possible for rescue teams to recover the Hassayna and Abu Sharia families, but during that same ceasefire period, more than 1,250 additional Palestinians have been killed. For Gaza's rescue workers, the task feels endless: every site they clear brings closure to some families, but thousands more wait, and there is almost no proper equipment for the kind of careful recovery work needed. The gap between the 7,400 people reported missing and the likely true number shows how thoroughly family networks have been wiped out — when whole families die, no one is left to report them missing. Meanwhile, both sides have set demands that the other refuses to meet, leaving the next phase of the ceasefire on very uncertain ground.