Gaza City, Gaza Strip – Every morning, Mahmoud Khalla goes to the nearby cemetery to visit the graves of the family members he lost during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
He has held on to this morning routine in the months since he buried them, imagining his family is still around.
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For Mahmoud, 40, the cemetery is the resting place of some of the people he has loved the most in his life.
His wife, his three children, his parents, his two brothers and their families, his sister and her children, and other relatives had all gathered in their family home in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on December 21, 2023.
An Israeli strike then targeted the five-storey family home, destroying the building and killing all 39 people inside. Mahmoud left his home shortly before it hit and is the only one left in his family.
The siege
Mahmoud remembers that day with heartache. Israeli tanks had surrounded the area near the house in Jabalia, northern Gaza, making it dangerous for people to move around. Food was already scarce due to the ongoing Israeli siege. In the evening, Mahmoud left the house in search of provisions to feed his family.
“I told them I would go and see what was available,” he told Al Jazeera. “As soon as I had been out for about 15 minutes, I heard a huge explosion.”
“I ran back and discovered that the targeted house was ours. I was in complete shock. But I pulled myself together. With the help of a few neighbours who were still in the area, we tried to rescue anyone who might be under the rubble.”
Mahmoud stands beside his family home, destroyed in an Israeli strike that killed 39 relatives [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]Israeli air attacks, quadcopters and surveillance aircraft continued to target the area. It made it impossible for Mahmoud and his neighbours to search for survivors.
“A surveillance aircraft dropped a bomb on us, so we immediately ran away,” he says. “We came back the next morning.”
Ambulances and civil defence teams were also unable to reach the site that night.
With this sense of helplessness, he imagined that some of his family might still be alive under the rubble, waiting to be rescued. He felt as though he had died a thousand times that night.
The following morning, he returned to the site and called out to his family members who might be beneath the ruined home. Nobody answered, and it was at this moment he realised he had lost nearly every person he loved.
“There were five floors of rubble. It was impossible for us to pull anyone out,” he said.
Mahmoud holds a photo of his daughter Huda, killed with her mother and siblings [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]Alone
That attack marked the beginning of a long period of emptiness for Mahmoud. With his home destroyed and almost all of his relatives killed or displaced to the south, he had nowhere to go.
“Even my uncles had been killed,” he says. “Their house, opposite ours, was targeted nine days before our family home. Eighteen people were killed in that attack. The rest of the family had gone south.”
Mahmoud spent the following months displaced and alone. He moved between the streets in search of somewhere to sleep for the night. It was difficult to find shelter among displaced families when he had no relation to them.
“I was sleeping in the streets, or in cars or vehicles whenever I found one that was open,” he says. “I was totally lonely and homeless.”
With no shelter at all, Mahmoud was vulnerable to Israeli attacks. The struggle for food became as urgent as the need to find somewhere safe to sleep.
“You don’t know whether a bullet will hit you, whether a rocket will come, whether you will find food or where you will sleep,” he said.
Mahmoud recovered the remains of his family by hand from beneath the rubble [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]Recovering his family
After a “ceasefire” was announced for Gaza in October 2025, families began the difficult search for their missing loved ones. Nearly a year later, an estimated 8,000 people remain missing, their bodies likely under the rubble of their homes or in other locations.
Months after the “ceasefire” began and bombing decreased, Mahmoud started recovering the remains of his family members himself. They had been entombed among the remains of their home for the last 29 months.
“The feeling that my family was still under the rubble, without being buried, was very difficult,” he says. “It never left me.”
He approached the civil defence, the Red Cross and other authorities for help. But he says a severe shortage of equipment and a huge number of other families requesting assistance meant they could be of little help.
Eventually, with the help of friends and neighbours who volunteered to work alongside him, he began the heartbreaking task of recovering his loved ones himself by hand.
He began recovering the remains around May this year, in a process that took three months.
“Sometimes, we managed to recover one person in a day. Sometimes, it took two days,” he said.
The first people he found were two relatives who had been sheltering with the family. The last were his sister and her children, who had been buried together.
He buried his family members at a cemetery near Jabalia an-Nazla, in northern Gaza.
“I felt a great sense of relief when I finally buried them,” he said. “It took me three months to recover all of their remains, working day by day.”
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