Israel’s ‘Grotesque’ Detention of Palestinian Bodies Is Intended to Silence and ‘Traumatise Families’

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Beneath the soil of anonymous plots known only by numbers, behind locked morgue doors in sub-zero temperatures, the walls of detention centres, and in secret cemeteries across Israel, bodies lie in limbo—unreturned, unnamed, and unseen. 

Some have been held incommunicado for decades, slowly lost to history. Many have joined them in the past eighteen months—fresh casualties in an unceasing war, a chilling reminder to Palestinians of the Israeli state’s attempt to control not only life, but death itself in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Gaza’s destruction since 7 October 2023 has been extensively documented. For nearly two years, a livestream of images and videos of bombardment, mass starvation, evidence of torture, incidences of sexual violence, mass incarceration, and even the discovery of mass graves has sent shockwaves around the world. 

Largely invisible is the Israeli army’s protracted war on the dead, now accelerating rapidly.

“The numbers are far higher now,” said Charlotte Kates, co-founder of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. “[Before October 7], bodies being held by the Israeli authorities were mainly from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Now, there is also a growing number from Gaza.”

The practice of withholding bodies during or after armed conflict is not unique to Israel and Russia, but they are the only two known states with explicit laws authorising it as a state policy. This practice contravenes international humanitarian law, which mandates the respectful return of remains to families, and is not sanctioned by most other countries. 

Israel’s policies on the issue date back to Britain’s imperial policies rolled out during the Palestinian Mandate. As early as 1930, British security forces buried the bodies of militants in graves far from their homes after their execution.

These informal practices were soon codified under Article 133 (iii) of the 1945 Emergency Regulations, granting military commanders sweeping authority to dictate the burial of executed individuals, including time, place, and who may attend.

This was subsequently amended in 1948, with provisions introduced to make “lawful for the Military Commander to order that the dead body of any person shall be buried in such a place as the Military Commander may direct,” and, “may, by such order, direct by whom and at what hour the said body shall be buried”.

This emergency law still remains in place.

After the British departed, the morbid counterinsurgency tool was incorporated by the army that same year, following the mass expulsion of the Palestinians and the close of the first Arab-Israeli war. But they also refined and expanded the measure, deploying it against Palestinian militants and civilians and Israel’s enemies across the Middle East.

Described by Israelis as “cemeteries for enemy combatants” and by Palestinians as the “cemeteries of numbers,” the graves are notorious for their shared characteristic of numbered placards meant to mark each corpse.

The policy went into high gear with the expansion of the occupation in 1967, going through various phases and becoming more widespread during periods of unrest and insurgency. Using the rationale of security and deterrence, Israeli authorities repeatedly argue that Palestinian funerals are potential flash points for riots and incitement.

Beyond collective punishment, bodies also hold political currency in negotiations, Dr Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, explained to Byline Times.

Since October 7, Israeli policy has metastasised. The number of Palestinian bodies held by Israeli authorities surged from 256 in 2022 to at least 684 by April 2025—a 167% increase.

The spike in numbers is driven by a strategy of collective punishment and terror, but this time in a more extreme form.

“This goes beyond a bargaining chip strategy; this is about silencing Palestinians amidst an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing,” Kates argued.

Hamas’s seizure of hundreds of hostages, many of whom have died in captivity or have been killed by Israeli forces, has prompted Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to widen the macabre policy.

“The circumstances are related to the sheer number of Israeli hostages being held by Hamas,” said Nareman Shehadeh Zoabi, an attorney at Adalah, an Israeli-Arab human rights group. “A few Israeli hostages used to be the issue in the past, now there are over 60 hostages and their bodies are being held.”

However, the number of Palestinian bodies now estimated to be held could be far higher. Israeli authorities have yet to release details of bodies taken from Gaza, and current estimates exclude 1,600 Hamas operatives calculated to have been killed on October 7.

“Although we do not have specific information about the fate of the bodies of Hamas fighters killed on October 7, it is clear that they have not been returned,” said Rami Saleh, Director of the Jerusalem Branch of the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center. “We believe the Israeli authorities are applying the same policy of withholding bodies to use them as leverage.”

But it is not only Palestinians whose bodies are being used as bargaining chips. Six Israeli citizens, Palestinian citizens of Israel, are being held for future negotiations, including the writer Walid Daqqah, one of Israel’s longest-serving prisoners, who died in custody in 2024. The decision taken by the former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, was retroactively upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court, which described the decision to hold Daqqah’s body as an “extremely exceptional case”.

The families and those representing them disagree. “These citizens, including Walid Daqqah, have no affiliation with Hamas,” said Zoabi, who is now representing the families to secure their release.

“Daqqah’s body is symbolic to the Israelis; he is a symbol of leadership amongst the Palestinians. He was meant to be released this year, but the Israeli state chose to retain his body for use in a potential future swap with Hamas. Using the bodies of your own citizens is extremely unusual.”

But beyond symbolism and negotiation, a darker incentive may be at play: concealment. Torture has been rampant and well-documented in military bases, detention centres, and makeshift warehouses set up by the Israeli army and police, and there have been at least 62 documented cases of Palestinian detainees who have died in Israeli prisons due to torture since the war began.

Those allegedly tortured to death are still being held. “Holding the bodies is damaging our ability to conduct forensic investigations. Every day, week, and month that passes since the person died makes it harder and harder to find the truth,” Tal Steiner, the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), told Byline Times.

“For the purpose of having a proper investigation into the nature of their deaths, they require autopsies which could reveal evidence of illegal activities and torture.”

Resistance to this policy remains fierce, and in some cases it has paid off. “The people leading this are the families,” said Kates. “In some cases, they have been successful in securing the release of bodies using international pressure and campaigns to force change. Collaboration between different organisations is vital to force the state’s hand.”

Others are going through the courts despite obstruction by the state, Steiner said.

In the case of Daqqah, the Supreme Court’s argument has no legal basis, according to Zoabi. “The Supreme Court is contradicting itself by saying there is an exception. If the other bodies don’t have more value than Daqqah’s, the ‘exception’ is an internal contradiction.”

In some respects, little has changed. The struggle to end this policy predates the horrifying events of October 7 and the war that has unfolded since, and it will become more vital once the war ends, when the search for the dead, and recovering held bodies, can truly begin.

However, Israel’s willingness to push this emergency law to new extremes is sobering, both because of the widespread manner of its deployment and its use to potentially conceal alleged crimes against humanity.

The systemic disappearances of thousands of Palestinians, dead or alive, are unprecedented, and their legacy will long outlast this current, and most violent phase, of the conflict. It will also leave long-lasting traumas in the post-conflict environment.

For those who have long fought to release the bodies of their loved ones over years and decades of occupation, the struggle carries on in the shadow of catastrophe. For many families in Gaza, where even cemeteries have been flattened, the struggle to recover loved ones held incommunicado by Israeli authorities is only just beginning.