In a cleared plot of land between buildings flattened by air strikes in Gaza City, row upon row of Palestinian flags were laid out neatly over the remains of dozens of people to be buried on Tuesday.

Hundreds of people attended the funeral ceremony, where music played from speakers at a site where Israeli strikes in late 2023 killed the 112 people now recovered from the rubble, Gaza's civil defence said.

Ahmed Abu Sharia, a member of the extended family of those being buried, said the funeral would at last provide closure for relatives.

"We came to mourn our martyrs, children, women and the elderly," he said.

"This is a funeral for the Palestinian people, because they are victims. People are under the rubble, and they did not fight or bear weapons," he added.

Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to a tally based on official Israeli figures.

Militants also took 251 hostages to Gaza.

Israel's retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 people, according to the territory's health ministry, which operates under Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.

A ceasefire took hold in October but progress on permanently ending the war has stalled, and Israeli forces currently control nearly 70 percent of the territory.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said 44 of the bodies recovered during two weeks in July were those of children, and all belonged to the same extended family.

"Our crews worked continuously for 17 days in an effort to recover these 112 bodies and remains from beneath the rubble," Mohammad Al-Mughayyir, director of operations for the civil defence said.

He added that teams often had to "dig through concrete and twisted steel with their bare hands."

"In some cases, complete skeletons remained intact, held together only by clothing."

Bassal said that more than 8,000 bodies are still trapped under Gaza's rubble. (AFP)



Edited by Cecil Wong