Gaza civil defence recovers the remains of 105 people after a 17-day search

Gaza's Civil Defence said on 1 October that crews had recovered the bodies and remains of 105 people from under a destroyed residential block in the Al-Taj area of Gaza City. The search took 17 days. The service said it worked with an Egyptian committee. Families gathered among the ruins as shrouded remains were laid out in rows for identification. A mass funeral followed in the city.

Spokesman Mahmoud Basal told Anadolu that the dead were civilians, and that they had a right to live in peace and safety. He used the recovery to repeat a call for the protection of civilians. The 105 are a recovery figure, not a new strike toll. The block they came from had already been destroyed. What changed on Thursday was that a 17-day dig, coordinated with an Egyptian team, produced a number large enough to be buried in one service.

One family account gives the dig a name. Taghreed Al-Hanawi said her daughter, the physician Alia Ramzi Al-Hanawi, was killed with her husband and four children. She said the family had been erased from the civil registry, and that holding the remains meant they could be buried. That is six people inside the 105, identified by a mother on the site. It is the kind of detail a rubble count usually lacks until a relative is standing there.

A second local account is larger and less secure. Fawaz Ziyara, a relative of victims and a survivor from the area, told Anadolu that about 300 people were killed when the residential block was struck, and that more bodies remain underneath. His estimate has not been independently verified. It should be read as a survivor's claim about the original strike, not as a Civil Defence total. The service's published number for this operation is 105 recovered, not 300 killed. The gap between those figures is the number of people Ziyara says are still in the rubble, plus anyone already recovered before this 17-day push. Until the Civil Defence revises its own count, 105 is the operational result and 300 is an allegation about the night of the strike.

The wider missing tally is a UN figure, separate from Al-Taj. UN officials have said Civil Defence recovered more than 630 bodies and sets of remains from destroyed buildings across Gaza between November 2025 and September 2026, and that more than 8,000 people were still estimated missing under rubble. Thursday's 105 sit inside that second effort, the slow dig after the strikes, rather than inside a daily fatality bulletin. If the UN running total is updated for October, Al-Taj will be one site in a list that already spans more than ten months. The 8,000 estimate is the scale against which 105, however large for a single block, is a fraction.

The Egyptian committee is the procedural fact that distinguishes this recovery from a local crew working alone. Coordination with an outside team usually means access, equipment, or a political arrangement that a municipal crew does not have. The Civil Defence did not publish the committee's mandate. It did say the operation was carried out with it. For families in Al-Taj, the relevant product of that arrangement is a row of shrouded remains and a funeral date, not the text of the mandate.

What remains unresolved is the original strike's death toll. The Civil Defence has now put 105 names, or partial remains, back into the hands of families. Ziyara's 300 is still a claim. The UN's 8,000 is still an estimate of people under buildings across the strip. The open question is whether the next dig at Al-Taj moves the 105 closer to Ziyara's number, or whether the site is closed with 105 as the final recovery. Families who buried relatives on Thursday do not have to wait for that answer. Families who are still missing someone in the same block do.