Topicsgaza 105 bodies buried october 2026gaza mass funeral yarmouk squareal taj building bombing 2023gaza bodies recovered rubblegaza civil defense recovery operationsheikh radwan cemetery funeraloctober 7 anniversary third year
One hundred and five bodies, buried in October 2026, killed in a single night in 2023. On Thursday, hundreds of Palestinians gathered in Gaza City for the mass funeral of 105 people killed on October 25, 2023, when Israeli airstrikes levelled the seven-storey Al-Taj 3 building and neighbouring residential structures at Yarmouk Square — the fifth-largest body-recovery operation in Gaza since October 2023 by body count, according to Al Jazeera correspondent Ibrahim al-Khalili.
The remains, wrapped in Palestinian flags, were carried in a funeral procession to the Sheikh Radwan Cemetery in northwest Gaza City after prayers attended by hundreds. Families carried photographs of the dead. Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud described a mood of "grief" — but also of "long-awaited closure" for families who have waited nearly three years to bury their own.
Why this matters: the delayed dead
This funeral is about more than 105 graves. It is a window onto the war's unfinished accounting: Gaza's Civil Defense says more than 8,000 bodies remain under the rubble across the Strip, and only 834 have been recovered from the debris so far. Every recovery operation like this one — 17 days of work at Yarmouk Square, in coordination with an Egyptian committee — converts an absence into a burial, a missing-persons file into a grave a family can visit. For the thousands of families still waiting, Thursday's funeral was both a precedent and a reminder of how slow that conversion is.
October 25, 2023: twenty bombs on Yarmouk Square
The strike belongs to the war's first weeks, when northern Gaza absorbed the heaviest bombardment. Al Jazeera reports that at least 20 bombs hit the Yarmouk Square neighbourhood on October 25, 2023, levelling the Al-Taj 3 building and adjacent residential blocks; a UN report measured destruction across roughly 5,700 square metres. Entire extended families were inside. Among the 105 recovered: 47 children and 32 women, according to Gaza's Civil Defense. (One aggregator cited 37 children and 38 women; this article uses the Civil Defense figures, attributed.)
Why it took three years to reach them
Bodies that could not be reached in 2023 stayed unreachable for nearly three years — and the reason, according to civil defence operations director Abdul al-Majdalawi, is that the machinery needed to reach them was itself a target: "bulldozers, excavators and other heavy machinery used by civil defence teams in Gaza were directly and deliberately targeted." The 17-day recovery operation that finally extracted the remains ran in coordination with an Egyptian committee, a sign of how recovery work in Gaza now depends on external machinery and access that did not exist during the heaviest fighting. The three-year delay is not an anomaly; it is the operating condition.
A funeral of flags and photographs
The human core of Thursday's story belongs to families like that of Osama Sharaf, who lost 37 family members in the Yarmouk Square attack — and saw 16 more of them recovered on Thursday, "including my father, my mother, and all of my siblings," as he told reporters. Wafa's coverage of the funeral describes hundreds in attendance, prayers over flag-wrapped remains, and the procession to Sheikh Radwan. These are the rituals that three years of war had deferred: a named grave, a photograph carried openly, a burial with witnesses.
The arithmetic of the unrecovered
Put the 105 in context. Gaza's Health Ministry reports 74,040 killed and 175,168 wounded since October 2023 — figures Israel contests, reported here as cited. Against that toll, 105 is a fraction of a percent; against the recovery effort, it is the fifth-largest single operation of the war. Since the October 2025 ceasefire, 1,439 people have been killed and 5,052 wounded, and 834 bodies have been recovered from rubble — the ceasefire era has become, among other things, a recovery era. The economics are stark: every unrecovered body is a family without closure and a casualty count that remains provisional. Gaza's true death toll will not be known until the rubble is cleared — and 8,000 bodies are still under it. (Related: IDF on high alert ahead of the October 7 anniversary; why Israel keeps striking Gaza despite the ceasefire; the al-Mawasi strike and the ceasefire toll.)
What comes next
The funeral lands five days before the October 7 third anniversary, with the IDF on maximum alert in Gaza and targeted strikes continuing, including Thursday's al-Mawasi drone strike that killed Tamer al-Hamayda, 42. As ceasefire-era recovery work continues, the variable that matters is machinery: heavy equipment access will determine whether the 8,000 still under the rubble are recovered in months or years. Each operation like Yarmouk Square's also revises the war's documented toll upward, body by body — a slow, forensic rewriting of what the war cost, conducted with excavators.
Sources: Al Jazeera (October 1, 2026; correspondents Ibrahim al-Khalili and Hani Mahmoud); Wafa; Gaza Civil Defense; Radiance News; Africanews. Gaza Health Ministry toll figures are contested by Israel and are reported here as cited.