Palestinian Man Loses Entire Family and Home in Gaza War

Gaza – Every morning, Mahmoud Khalla visits the nearby cemetery to see the graves of the family members he lost in the war in Gaza. He has kept up this habit for months since the day he buried them, as if his family were still nearby.

For Mahmoud, 40, the cemetery is the resting place of the people he loved most in his life.

His wife, three children, his parents, two brothers and their families, his sister and her children, along with many other relatives, had gathered at the family home in Jabalia, in northern Gaza, on Dec. 21, 2023.

An Israeli airstrike then hit the five-story house, destroying the building and killing all 39 people inside. Mahmoud had left the house shortly before the attack and is the only surviving member of his family.

The fateful day

Mahmoud recalls that day with searing pain. Israeli tanks had surrounded the area near the house in Jabalia, making movement dangerous. Food was already scarce because of the ongoing siege. That evening, Mahmoud left the house to look for food for his family.

“I told everyone I would go and see if there was anything,” he told Al Jazeera. “About 15 minutes after I went out, I heard a big explosion.”

“I ran back and found that the house that was hit was ours. I was completely stunned. But I tried to steady myself. Along with a few neighbors who were still in the area, we tried to rescue anyone who might still be under the rubble.”

However, Israeli airstrikes, drones and surveillance aircraft kept targeting the area, preventing Mahmoud and his neighbors from searching for survivors.

“A surveillance plane dropped a bomb on our location, so we fled immediately,” he said. “We came back the next morning.”

Ambulances and civil defense teams were also unable to reach the scene that night.

In his helplessness, he imagined that some of his relatives might still be alive under the rubble, waiting to be rescued. He felt as if he had died a thousand times that night.

The next morning, he returned to the site and called out the names of the relatives who might still be lying beneath the collapsed house. No one answered, and that was when he realized he had lost nearly everyone he loved.

“There were five floors of rubble. We couldn’t pull anyone out,” he said.

Alone amid the ruins

That attack marked the beginning of a long, empty period for Mahmoud. With his home destroyed and nearly all his relatives either killed or displaced to the south, he had nowhere to go.

“Even my uncles were killed,” he said. “Their house, opposite ours, was hit nine days before my family’s home. Eighteen people were killed in that strike. The rest of the family went south.”

Mahmoud spent the following months in exile and solitude. He wandered the streets looking for a place to sleep at night. It was hard to find shelter among displaced families when he had no kinship ties to them.

“I slept on the street, or in a car or vehicle if I found one left open,” he said. “I was completely alone and homeless.”

With no shelter, Mahmoud was vulnerable to Israeli attacks. The struggle to find food became as urgent as the need to find a safe place to sleep.

“You don’t know whether a bullet will hit you, whether a rocket will come, whether you’ll find food or where you’ll sleep,” he said.

Recovering his family’s remains by hand

After a ceasefire was announced for Gaza in October 2025, families began the difficult search for missing relatives. Nearly a year later, an estimated 8,000 people are still missing, their bodies possibly lying beneath the rubble of homes or elsewhere.

Months after the ceasefire began and the bombing eased, Mahmoud started searching for his relatives’ remains himself. They had been buried in the rubble of the house for 29 months.

“The feeling that my family was still under the rubble, unburied, was incredibly difficult,” he said. “That feeling never left me.”

He contacted civil defense, the Red Cross and other authorities for help. But according to him, a severe shortage of equipment and the large number of other families also needing support meant they could not do much.

Eventually, with the help of friends and neighbors who volunteered to work alongside him, he began the heartbreaking task of recovering his relatives’ remains himself.

He began retrieving the remains around May this year, in a process that lasted three months.

“Sometimes we found one person in a day. Sometimes it took two days,” he said.

The first he found were two relatives who had sheltered with the family. The last were his sister and her children, who were lying together.

He buried his relatives in a cemetery near Jabalia an-Nazla, in northern Gaza.

“I felt a great deal of relief when I was finally able to bury them,” he said. “It took me three months to recover all their remains, working day after day.”