Gaza: Bodies have remained buried beneath the rubble in Gaza for months, with their numbers revealing the grim toll of Israel's military campaign, which is aimed at uprooting families and erasing the population's presence and identity.
According to Jordan News Agency, the discovery of bodies from the Al-Sabra massacre has shed further light on what rights advocates describe as a campaign of extermination aimed at erasing Palestinian existence in the Gaza Strip from its roots. Gaza did not bury "bodies" alone last Tuesday morning. It buried 112 people, each of whom had a voice, a laugh, and an empty place at the dinner table. The entire Abu Sharia and Hassaina families were buried, including grandparents, parents, and children, after their remains were recovered from beneath the rubble more than two and a half years after they were killed.
As rescuers uncovered new details of the tragedy, they spent 136 consecutive hours working through stones and dust to recover 112 bodies, including 40 children, 38 women, and seven people with disabilities. Another 157 bodies remain missing beneath the rubble. A single residential neighborhood had thus swallowed 308 people in one night in November 2023. "This is not a figure in a report," but a home that was once full of life, the report said, adding that when the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry was asked whether the pattern represented an isolated incident or a broader phenomenon, its conclusion was that it constituted genocide.
Palestinian human rights researcher Islam Al-Tamimi told the Jordan News Agency (Petra) that international law does not determine genocide solely by the number of victims but also examines whether there was an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a human group what lawyers refer to as "specific intent." He said the International Court of Justice had found indications that such intent existed, while the UN commission of inquiry had also reached the same conclusion. He added that Law for Palestine had submitted a complaint to the International Criminal Court documenting more than 500 cases of direct incitement by Israeli leaders, soldiers, and public figures, which it said contributed to an environment conducive to genocide, including mass killings, serious physical and psychological harm, and the imposition of living conditions making survival impossible, as well as the destruction of health, education, and the environment.
Al-Tamimi said what links the Al-Sabra massacre to other incidents is the targeting of the family as an institution and the attempt to end its continuity, which international law defines as preventing a group from reproducing and continuing through future generations, under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention. He said a fact sheet by the Independent Commission for Human Rights, drawing on evidence presented by South Africa before the International Court of Justice, documented four manifestations of this pattern.
The first was the complete erasure of families from the civil registry through the bombing of homes containing three generations at once. Some 2,700 families were entirely wiped out, while more than 6,000 families were left with a single survivor carrying the sole memory of an erased family, he said. The second was a war that did not spare children, with more than 21,500 children killed, including premature babies who died in incubators after electricity supplies were cut and others who died from hunger and malnutrition.
The third was what he described as a war on motherhood, with more than 12,500 women killed, pregnant women subjected to hunger, maternity facilities destroyed, and supplies of milk and medicine blocked, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,022 infants before they reached one year of age. The fourth was the profound psychological trauma caused by the loss of a survivor's sense of existence, memory, family lineage, and identity.
Al-Tamimi added that attacks on families could not be separated from the collapse of society as a whole. Education had suffered a severe blow, with more than 20,000 students killed and hundreds of thousands of school and university students deprived of education amid the destruction of universities and attacks on academics. The health sector had also collapsed as hospitals were destroyed and medical personnel targeted, turning survival into a daily gamble. The tragedy has been compounded by delayed justice, leaving survivors suspended between mourning and uncertainty over the fate and remains of their relatives while impunity continues.
International law expert Anis Fawzi Qasem said the latest reports of the massacre point to atrocities even more brutal than those already witnessed or reported during the Gaza war. He said this further confirms that the Israeli military has demonstrated itself to be among the world's most degraded and criminal armed forces. Qasem said the latest report issued in June 2026 by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory supported this conclusion, stating that Israeli forces intentionally and deliberately killed children.
He said this revealed the nature of the education, training, and instruction given to Israeli soldiers by the military's senior leadership, amounting to training in unrestricted killing and conveying the message that targeting civilians, including children, was permissible. Qasem said it might even be an understatement to say that the Israeli military had seriously, repeatedly, deliberately, and systematically violated virtually every legal rule governing armed conflict.
Recent figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics show that since the outbreak of the Gaza war, more than 73,350 Palestinians have been killed, including about 21,500 children, more than 1,022 infants, and about 12,500 women, while around 9,500 people remain missing. Children and women account for about 55% of the victims, according to the figures. Hundreds were also killed during periods covered by truces and ceasefires, indicating, the report said, that the killing campaign had not stopped.
Against this backdrop, the report called for urgent justice, including speeding up proceedings at the International Criminal Court, documenting the four forms of the alleged destruction of family continuity as evidence of specific intent, and pursuing all those responsible. It also called for transitional justice mechanisms to document violations and preserve evidence, urgent and unconditional reconstruction, and long-term psychological and social support programs for sole survivors, children, and women.
In a related development, an analytical monitoring exercise by human rights and media activist Tawfiq Shawar of reactions by Israeli users on Channel 14's Facebook page to a report about the burial of 112 victims from the Abu Sharia and Hassaina families found what he described as a dangerous and worrying shift in public discourse toward fascism and the dehumanization of victims. The post drew widespread reactions, including inciting comments calling for the victims to be "disposed of and transferred to garbage containers" or "finely ground and thrown into sewage networks," as well as calls for their incineration.
The seriousness of the comments was compounded by the fact that they came from people from different social and professional backgrounds, including employees at major medical centers, doctors, lawyers, and political figures, suggesting, according to the monitoring, that hate and genocidal rhetoric had moved beyond isolated individual opinions to become part of a broader and systematic social environment. Commenting on these grave violations, public law professor and political analyst Muath Walid Abu Dalou said Israel had killed children, women, and men in Gaza under what he called false security pretexts, which its actions in both the West Bank and Gaza had exposed.
He said the recovery of bodies that had remained buried beneath the rubble for years was compelling evidence of the scale of the military brutality. Abu Dalou said the actions constituted a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and the four Geneva Conventions, which require the protection of civilians and civilian objects. The enormous numbers of Palestinians killed, wounded, or missing, he said, reflected the use of military force that had destroyed both people and infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The report said its findings and documented facts were based on official and human rights sources, including the Independent Commission for Human Rights, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry, Law for Palestine, Human Rights Watch, the Palestinian Health Ministry, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Gaza's civil defense service, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Palestinian news agency, WAFA, and other international organizations.