Gaza Civil Defense Recovers 112 Bodies From the Rubble of a Single Family’s Homes in Sabra

Palestinian Civil Defense teams recovered the remains of 112 Palestinians on Friday morning from beneath the ruins of the al-Hasayna family homes in the Sabra neighborhood, south of Gaza City. Around 200 members of the family were massacared when Israel bombed their homes earlier in the genocide, burying entire families where they sheltered. The recovery is one of the largest single retrievals since the ceasefire began, and it laid bare once more the scale of the killing Israel carried out against Gaza’s families in their own homes.

The bodies were pulled out over hours of painstaking work, with rescuers using their hands and light equipment to lift concrete slabs and reach the dead who had lain under the wreckage for months. Many of the remains were decomposed beyond recognition, and teams worked to preserve what they could for identification so that families could bury their relatives with names rather than as numbers.

The operation in Sabra has been building for days. Last Monday, Civil Defense crews recovered the remains of 99 Palestinians from under the ruins of the homes of the Abu Shariah and al-Hasayna families in the same neighborhood, in what has become one of the deadliest concentrations of killing. Together, the recoveries in Sabra alone account for hundreds of Palestinians killed in their homes and left buried for months as Israel blocked the heavy equipment needed to reach them.

Across Gaza, Civil Defense has launched a major push to retrieve the dead now that the bombing has eased, moving through flattened neighborhoods where thousands of bodies are still thought to lie beneath the rubble. Rescuers describe reaching homes where whole families were killed together, recovering parents and children side by side, in a process that is expected to stretch on for months given the scale of destruction and the shortage of machinery.