19 bodies, mostly women and children, recovered from Gaza City rubble

Nineteen bodies, most of them women and children, have been pulled from beneath the ruins of a shattered residential building in Gaza City, as rescue crews continue their grim and painstaking search through the territory’s vast fields of rubble, the Al Jazeera reported.

Gaza’s civil defence said the recovery operation at the Karam building in western Gaza City concluded on Saturday after four days of relentless searching. The effort was carried out largely by hand, underscoring the severe shortage of heavy machinery needed to move massive slabs of shattered concrete.

Mohammed Abu Dan, who oversees recovery operations, said specialised medical and civil defence teams would now shift to another location in Gaza City to continue searching for people buried beneath the ruins.

Across the territory, civil defence crews have repeatedly warned that the lack of heavy equipment is turning recovery operations into an exhausting race against time. Workers have been forced to rely on rudimentary tools and manual labour to sift through the remains of buildings destroyed in Israeli strikes.

Gaza’s health ministry estimates that more than 8,000 people remain missing beneath the rubble across the territory.

According to the ministry’s latest figures, since the ceasefire took effect on 11 October 2025, at least 1,254 people have been killed, 4,121 wounded and 804 bodies recovered from the rubble. The overall death toll since October 2023 has surpassed 73,300, with more than 174,000 people wounded, it said.

The latest recovery comes days after Gaza City held a mass funeral for 112 members of the Abu Sharia and al-Hasayna families, whose remains were recovered from the wreckage of a residential block in the Sabra neighbourhood. The building had been destroyed in an Israeli strike in November 2023.

As rescue teams move from one devastated site to another, the painstaking recovery of bodies continues to expose the human toll buried beneath Gaza’s ruins.