Hamas authorities on Tuesday held a mass funeral for 112 people they said were pulled out of the rubble of a series of residential buildings apparently hit in Israeli strikes in the opening days of the war, after launching an effort to find hundreds of people still missing.

The display of mourning came as the US-backed Board of Peace sought to seal the second phase of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace deal, which would see Hamas disarm and Israel stage withdrawals in the Strip.

While Israel has balked at demands it halt strikes against terror targets during this phase, the military acknowledged on Tuesday that it had tightened attack regulations, and officials said that at the moment, strikes could only be carried out with the express consent of IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir.

Hundreds of people gathered as the bodies wrapped in Palestinian flags were laid in rows near the destroyed buildings before being carried on stretchers through a narrow street for burial in a nearby cemetery. A sign was adorned with portraits of the dead — men, women and children.

“This day is mixed with grief, and it has reopened our wounds three years after this massacre,” said Taysir Al-Hassayna, a member of one of the two clans that Hamas said were affected by the strike.

“It has brought sorrow back to our children and women,” he said. “But our consolation is that we believe they are martyrs with God.”

The November 2023 strike had hit a residential compound belonging to the Hassayna and Abu Sharia clans in Gaza City’s southern Sabra neighborhood, according to Hamas’s civil defense agency.

The IDF said at the time that it struck some 300 targets across the Gaza Strip. It has not commented specifically on the alleged strike and death toll in Sabra. The military did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters on its account of the incident.

Hamas-affiliated media in the Strip described the mass burial Tuesday as the war’s largest, and said it was the result of a body recovery effort launched on July 14.

The Hamas agency said Saturday that its team had spent some 136 hours digging out the 112 bodies, which included the remains of 40 children, 38 women and seven men with disabilities.

Another 157 people were still buried under the rubble, the agency said. About 40 bodies had also been recovered soon after the strike itself, in a frantic scramble of rough tools and bare hands, according to The Associated Press.

Hamas official Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil........

© The Times of Israel