Mourners attend a mass funeral for Palestinians whose bodies were recovered from the rubble of a residential building hit in an Israeli strike in Oct.2023, according to the Civil Defense, in Gaza City Oct.1, 2026. (Credit: Dawoud Abu Alkas/ Reuters)
BEIRUT — The bodies and remains of 105 Palestinians found beneath the rubble of residential buildings in Gaza City which Israel bombed in October 2023, were buried in mass funerals organized Thursday morning, attended by the victims' relatives.
Hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza gathered around the shrouded bodies, covered with Palestinian flags, amid the ruins of the Taj residential complex, which Israeli warplanes bombed several times nearly three years ago in the early days of the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip.
The victims, including children, women and elderly people, were recently recovered by Gaza Civil Defense teams from beneath the debris of the former residential towers in Gaza City and subsequently identified at local hospitals, according to a local Al Jazeera correspondent.
16 dead and 57 wounded in 48 hours
Despite a "cease-fire" announced nearly a year ago in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas, Israeli strikes continue to hit the besieged enclave daily.
According to various media and local Palestinian journalists, several Israeli drone strikes and artillery attacks have killed several people in the Jabalia refugee camp and Gaza City in the north of the enclave, as well as in Khan Younis in the south.
In its latest two updates, the local health ministry said it had recorded 16 additional deaths over the past 48 hours, along with 57 wounded, following further Israeli strikes across the enclave, which Israel occupies more than 60% of.
The ministry also reported an additional death of a person who succumbed to injuries sustained in a previous Israeli attack. This brings the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire since the “cease-fire” took effect on Oct. 11, 2025, to at least 1,439, with another 5,052 wounded, according to the ministry.
The Israeli army for its part said Thursday that it had killed two Hamas members the previous day in strikes on Gaza City, including one described as a "section commander" in the armed wing of the Palestinian movement. In the south of the enclave, the Israeli army also said it had killed Palestinian journalist Mohammad Abdel Aziz al-Najjar, claiming that he had "participated" in the Hamas attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Gaza government media office later identified al-Najjar as the 263rd journalist killed by Israel in the enclave since October 2023. The figure differs from that of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which recently revised its methodology and counted 191 Palestinian media professionals killed by Israeli forces.
In total, at least 74,040 Palestinians have been killed and another 175,168 wounded since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, launched in response to the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, which killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel.
1 p.m. news recap: Iraq postpones to late June deadline for disarming pro-Iran militias; Abu Dhabi opens probe into Flydubai flight incident; another inmate dies in Roumieh