Gaza City Plans Mass Funeral for 105 Killed in 2023 Yarmouk Strike
Palestinians in Gaza City are preparing to bury the remains of 105 people killed in October 2023, in a delayed mass funeral scheduled for Thursday.
The victims were killed on the afternoon of October 25, 2023, in Israeli airstrikes on the Yarmouk Square neighbourhood of Gaza City, according to reporting published October 1, 2026. Al Jazeera
The strikes involved at least 20 bombs that levelled the seven-storey Al Taj 3 building. Several other residential buildings were destroyed in the same attack.
Coffins containing the recovered remains will be carried in a funeral procession involving family members on Thursday, according to Gaza's General Directorate of Civil Defence. Civil defence is Gaza's emergency rescue service. Burial will follow in the Sheikh Radwan cemetery northwest of Gaza City.
Gaza's civil defence said the recovery operation was carried out in coordination with an Egyptian committee. Al Jazeera correspondent Ibrahim Khalili, reporting from Gaza City, described it as the fifth largest of its kind since October 2023 by number of bodies recovered.
Civil defence operations director Abdul al-Majdalawi said it had been "impossible" to reach the bodies at the time of the attack. The scale of destruction was extensive. Recovery took years.
Osama Sharaf said 37 members of his family were killed in the attack.
The planned burial follows a sequence of similar recoveries and mass funerals in Gaza City. Large crowds attended a mass funeral for 112 people, mostly women and children killed in an Israeli strike, as reported in early August 2026. BBC Those 112 bodies were members of the Al-Hassayna clan found in rubble, according to Reuters reporting from August 4, 2026. Their decomposed remains were laid on stretchers shrouded in flags for the ceremony.
Later in August, mourners gathered in Gaza City on Thursday, August 20, to attend funerals for Palestinians whose bodies were recently recovered. Reuters That funeral honoured 50 recovered bodies from three families.
Custody and return of remains has been a separate strand. Israel returned the bodies of more than 80 Palestinians killed in its military offensive in the Gaza Strip, as reported on August 5, 2024. An Israeli airstrike killed at least eight Palestinians and wounded 20 attending a funeral in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip, as reported on July 17, 2026.
The broader context here is protracted rubble recovery and delayed handling of the dead. Think of it like a rescue system trying to work with blocked roads and broken equipment. For those tracking death tolls, rescue capacity, and limits on reaching strike sites, the three-year gap between strike and burial matters. It affects identification, records, and informing families. It also puts long pressure on storage, transport, and cemetery space.
Looking at what this means for Gaza City in particular, the Yarmouk case brings several patterns into one operation. Heavy bombing of tall residential buildings. No immediate access for rescuers. Later clearance through coordinated work. Then collective burial long after the deaths. For relatives, the funeral gives a clear moment to mourn. For official bodies, it records deaths from years earlier that only now enter burial records.
