Gaza may witness the largest funeral in its history, or one of the largest funerals in the history of the Palestinian cause.

One family has spent weeks searching beneath the rubble for the bodies of their children and women. They have managed to recover the remains of 112 victims from what is known as the Abu Sharia family massacre, committed in November 2023.

For the first time, the staggering numbers we have read in reports about mass killings will become coffins, shrouds, and mourning tents. For the first time, such an enormous number of victims will be honored with a funeral attended by thousands of mourners، a scene that will once again remind the world of the scale of this crime, a single massacre that claimed hundreds of lives.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of this story is that, for weeks, family members dug through the rubble with their bare hands and simple tools in search of their loved ones so they could give them a dignified burial. Heavy machinery is still not being allowed into Gaza.

The earthquake that struck Gaza was not a natural disaster. It was man-made, caused by one of the cruelest and most destructive campaigns of violence the world has witnessed.

And the most painful truth of all is this: they found only about one hundred bodies out of nearly three hundred people believed to have been killed in one of the deadliest massacres of the war. No one knows whether the remaining bodies were obliterated, or whether their remains are still buried somewhere beneath the endless rubble.