TEHRAN — Thousands of mourners gathered in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood on Sunday for a mass funeral honoring 100 Palestinian martyrs whose remains were recently exhumed from beneath shattered residential buildings.

Draped in Palestinian flags, the victims included at least 70 children, alongside women and the elderly from the Malaka, Rahim, Balawi, Qanbour, and Salmi families.

They were killed when Israeli warplanes leveled their multi-story homes over two years ago. The Malaka family alone lost 55 members in a single strike during November 2023.

For years, grief-stricken survivors could only stand before mountains of crushed concrete, unable to reach the dead due to incessant shelling and a complete lack of extraction equipment.

A fraction of those still buried

Sunday’s ceremony near the Imam al-Shafi’i Mosque marks only a small portion of an overwhelming human tragedy.

While the Palestinian Health Ministry records over 73,600 killed since October 2023, this official figure excludes thousands trapped in the ruins.

Civil Defense officials and independent human rights monitors estimate between 8,000 and 14,000 Palestinians remain entombed beneath the debris across the enclave.

The recovery in Zeitoun formed part of the second phase of an emergency initiative launched in mid-July.

This phase targets 147 destroyed residential sites across northern and central Gaza, where over 1,000 martyrs remain buried.

Rescue crews recently pulled 233 bodies from just 20 residential buildings after more than 800 hours of intensive effort.

At other sites, such as the Engineers Tower in Nuseirat refugee camp, teams are attempting to recover 150 people using a single excavator.

Progress remains agonizingly slow because workers lack basic machinery, forcing them to sift through reinforced concrete using shovels and bare hands.

Israeli blockade starves rescue teams

The delay in unearthing these victims stems directly from the ongoing Israeli blockade and deliberate military targeting.

Israeli air strikes have systematically targeted Palestinian Civil Defense facilities throughout the war, destroying roughly 85 percent of the agency’s heavy equipment and emergency response vehicles.

Despite cease-fire stipulations requiring the regime to permit the entry of heavy excavators and bulldozers, Israeli forces continue to block all heavy equipment, spare parts, and fuel supplies.

Brigadier General Raed al-Dahshan, director of Gaza’s Civil Defense, stated that rescue crews operate under virtually non-existent capabilities.

He explained that what an excavator can accomplish in one hour takes manual laborers a full month. Rescuers frequently pull out children’s toys and schoolbooks alongside bone fragments.

Without heavy equipment, retrieving the thousands of martyrs still trapped under Gaza’s 40 million tons of debris will take years rather than months, prolonging the torment of grieving families who call civil defense offices daily asking for news of their missing relatives.

Erasing evidence of war crimes

The crisis is further exacerbated by Israeli military operations that dismantle and clear rubble in occupied zones.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned that clearing debris without international oversight risks destroying physical evidence of genocide.

The Palestinian Center for Missing Persons warned that military bulldozers operate indiscriminately in restricted zones, crushing skeletal remains and mixing them with building materials, making future identification through DNA testing impossible.

Concurrently, reports indicate Israeli authorities are holding approximately 1,700 Palestinian bodies in detention facilities for potential leverage in negotiations.

For families such as the Balawis, receiving the remains of loved ones brings a bitter form of closure after years of waiting. Yet for thousands of families across Gaza, the wait continues.

By denying entry to basic rescue equipment, Israel continues its policy of collective punishment, ensuring shattered neighborhoods remain open mass graves.