Crews recover 19 bodies from rubble of destroyed Gaza building

Nineteen bodies, most of them women and children, have been recovered from under the rubble of a destroyed residential building in Gaza City, Gaza’s civil defence said in a statement.

The recovery, which concluded on Saturday, is the latest in a slow, largely manual campaign to retrieve the dead from beneath Gaza’s ruins. Such efforts are hampered by a chronic shortage of the heavy machinery needed to clear broken concrete.

Mohammed Abu Dan, who oversees recovery efforts, said that work had ended at the “Karam” building in Gaza’s western area after four consecutive days of searching.

Specialised medics and civil defence crews would now move to a new site elsewhere in Gaza City, he said, to resume search operations.

Civil defence officials have repeatedly said crews are relying on rudimentary tools and exhausting manual labour in the absence of heavy equipment capable of shifting the concrete slabs left behind by Israeli strikes.

Gaza’s Health Ministry says more than 8,000 people remain missing under rubble across the territory.

Since the ceasefire took hold on October 11 last year, at least 1,254 people have been killed, 4,121 wounded and 804 bodies recovered from rubble, according to the ministry’s latest count.

The overall death toll since October 2023 stands at more than 73,300, with more than 174,000 wounded.

The recovery operation follows a mass funeral held in Gaza City on Tuesday for 112 people from the Abu Sharia and al-Hasayna families, whose remains were pulled from the wreckage of a residential block in Gaza’s Sabra neighbourhood, which was destroyed in an Israeli strike in November 2023.