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Gaza’s civil defence agency announced Saturday the completion of an operation that recovered the remains of 112 people from a residential block in the Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City nearly two years after it was destroyed. The agency’s figures show the dead included 40 children, 38 women and seven people with disabilities while crews believe another 157 bodies remain trapped beneath reinforced concrete. Search teams worked 136 hours largely by hand and with limited resources as part of wider recovery efforts across areas still in ruins from the conflict.
The residential block belonging to the Al-Hassayneh and Abu Sharia families was hit by Israeli strikes on November 23, 2023, according to the civil defence agency. Colonel Mohammed Abu Dan, who oversaw the site for the agency, said the search would continue despite difficult conditions and the absence of heavy equipment. The agency noted that manual sifting through debris has become the standard approach in many such operations due to resource constraints.
The International Committee of the Red Cross supported the recovery, the civil defence agency reported. ICRC spokesperson Amani Al-Naouq described the search for bodies under rubble as a critical humanitarian issue. Thousands of families have waited more than two and a half years for information on missing relatives, she added.
The discovery comes amid the broader war in Gaza that began with the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Israeli authorities have said that assault killed 1,221 people and saw 251 taken hostage. The Hamas-run health ministry has reported more than 73,300 deaths in the Palestinian enclave since the fighting started, a figure that United Nations agencies have confirmed as reliable.
Civil defence teams have carried out repeated recovery missions throughout Gaza as large swathes of the territory remain inaccessible or uncleared more than two years into the conflict. The agency has highlighted how the lack of specialised machinery prolongs operations and increases risks to workers sifting through unstable rubble. Similar efforts in other neighbourhoods have yielded comparable numbers of remains from strikes dating back to late 2023.
