For over half a century, Palestinian families have suffered a cruel double blow. Not only do they face the devastating loss of loved ones killed amid Israel’s ongoing occupation, but many also endure the prolonged agony of being denied the right to bury their dead with dignity.

This is due to the Israeli occupation’s systematic policy of withholding the corpses and remains of hundreds of Palestinians killed by its forces – whether resistance fighters, detainees, or civilians – which forms part of what academics call necropolitics: the politics of death, and the power of authorities to decide who lives and who dies.

Withholding of martyr’s bodies: Israeli occupation’s system of control over Palestinian

In the case of Palestine, the Israeli regime’s policy of withholding bodies, and even setting strict rules for funerals and mourning, is part of a broader system of colonial domination which seeks to control Palestinian life, death, and memory.

Mourning is weaponised, to enforce occupation and erode collective identity, stripping Palestinians of dignity and closure, and inflicting suffering far beyond death. Families feel completely desperate, not only because they have lost their child or loved one, but because they are unable to carry out a burial, and so have had their final act of saying goodbye stolen from them.

Adalah – The Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, actively intervenes in cases where Palestinian families are denied the bodies of their deceased relatives by the Israeli occupation, offering legal representation by petitioning the Israeli Supreme Court to demand the release of the bodies for burial.

Nareman Shehadeh-Zoabi, an attorney at Adalah’s civil and political rights department who has led many of the recent cases on this policy, explained:

Withholding bodies inflicts unbearable pain on families. Burial is the final act of love, the closure that allows them to accept the reality of death. Without it, some cannot believe their sons are gone, clinging to the hope they are still alive. Parents feel they have failed, even unable to do this last duty for their child. As a lawyer, it is heartbreaking to face mothers who cannot understand the logic behind this policy. No explanation eases their suffering. Denying families the right to bury their loved ones is a cruelty that deepens grief and prevents healing.

Cemeteries of numbers dehumanise Palestinians

This practice has become a key instrument of occupation, gradually becoming institutionalised and embedded into Israeli law, with the remains and corpses of hundreds of Palestinians now being withheld by the occupation.

Rather than returning them for a dignified burial, some are frozen in morgues, while others are buried in unmarked graves in military-controlled cemeteries. These ‘cemeteries of numbers’, located in closed military zones which are inaccessible to the public, have become emblematic of dehumanisation. Bodies are stripped of names and identities, marked only by numbered metal plaques, with each number corresponding to individual files kept by Israeli security authorities.

The Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre (JLAC) documents cases and coordinates campaigns for the return of bodies, through the ‘National Campaign for the Retrieval of Martyrs’ Bodies‘, which it launched in 2008:

According to its documentation, 726 Palestinian bodies are currently being withheld by the occupation and, of these, 256 are buried in the ‘cemeteries of numbers’. The bodies include 85 prisoners, at least 10 women, and 67 children. All other bodies are men over 18 years old, who were killed in a variety of situations, including extra judicial killings or forcibly disappeared in unclear situations:

Decades long suspicions that Israel harvests the organs of dead Palestinians

The campaign’s data does not include bodies withheld from the Gaza Strip, although up to 1,500 Gazan corpses, many unidentifiable and decomposed, are now held in refrigerated containers in the Sde Timan military detention centre in Israel, notorious for its human rights abuses.

Many Palestinian bodies in Gaza have also been wrapped in plastic bags, dumped on top of each other in mass graves, with families left completely unaware of what has happened to their loved ones, or whereabouts they are buried. The occupation has dug up and confiscated bodies from these mass graves and various hospitals in Gaza, and withheld them from the families:

According to Euro-Med Monitor, some of the bodies which have been returned have shown evidence of organ theft, including missing vital organs such as livers, hearts, and kidneys, as well as cochleae and corneas. Accusations of organ trafficking by the occupation have been going on for decades, and the human rights organisation is calling for an independent international committee to be created to investigate organ theft suspicions.

Abdallah Alzighari is president of the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club, which advocates for the rights of thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons by providing legal support, documenting conditions, and offering assistance to detainees’ families. He said:

The Israeli occupation system is considered the only state in the world that practices this humanitarian and moral crime, whereby not only is the body of the martyr punished by being detained in the refrigerators or cemeteries of numbers, but it is also a collective punitive policy against the families of the martyrs in general. This contravenes all international laws and agreements. It is the right of these martyrs, whose bodies are being held by the occupation, to be buried in accordance with religious, moral and national teachings, so they may be honoured by having a place where their families can visit them at any time they wish, so they may feel reassured and at peace when they practice the traditions related to burying their son, who has been absent from them for many long years, inside the occupation’s prisons.

Palestinian bodies as bargaining chips

Israeli authorities acknowledge again and again that the main purpose of withholding these bodies, and causing this unimaginable harm and desperation to the families, is for use as political tools – bargaining chips in negotiations with armed groups.

The policy has its roots in the days of British colonial rule in Palestine, with Regulation 133(3), imposed in 1945, allowing military authorities to withhold bodies as long as they deemed necessary, for ‘security reasons’. Following the 1967 occupation, Regulation 133(3) was embedded in Israeli military orders, and has now become systemic, with the Knesset and the occupation’s judicial system playing a pivotal role in legitimising this policy.

September 2024 saw the court allow, for the first time, the body of a Palestinian citizen of Israel to be held for purposes of leverage in future negotiations. The body was that of Walid Daqqa, who died of cancer in prison, at the age of 62, in April 2024.

Daqqa, who came from a Palestinian town in central Israel was in prison for decades, for the alleged kidnap and murder of an Israeli soldier – a crime he repeatedly denied. His body has still not been returned to his family.

Miriam Azem, Adalah’s international advocacy coordinator said:

The withholding of Palestinian bodies was already a widespread policy before October 2023, due to the Security Cabinet adopting two cabinet decisions that formally introduced this as an Israeli policy, and effectively allowed the policy of withholding bodies without any kind of time limit for purposes of negotiations. But over the last two years it has been vastly extended, both in terms of scope and who it’s being applied towards. For the first time, Israel is also using this policy against its own citizens. Palestinians holding an Israeli citizenship are now being withheld in their death by Israeli authorities for negotiations, to release Israeli hostages from Hamas.

According to Adalah, there are at least nine bodies of Palestinian citizens of Israel currently being withheld by the Israeli occupation authorities, as bargaining chips for future negotiations with groups such as Hamas. This policy has been confirmed in several rulings, including in January 2025, when the Israeli Supreme Court rejected petitions from Adalah against the state’s withholding of the bodies of six Palestinian citizens of Israel, classifying them as security prisoners and allowing the continued retention of their remains, without requiring individual case assessments:

Israel denying Palestinian families the bodies of their murdered children

This even applies in cases involving minors, such as the recent ruling in July 2025 allowing the continued withholding of the body of 14-year-old Wadia Shadi Sa’d Elyan, from East Jerusalem, who was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces near the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, in February 2024.

Israeli authorities allege he was involved in a stabbing attack on an Israeli police officer, but video footage shows him being shot from behind while fleeing the scene, and then again while laying motionless on the road.

Despite this evidence, the court accepted the state’s position that the body may continue to be held for leverage in prisoner exchange negotiations. Adalah, who represented Elyan’s family in court, argued that the prolonged withholding of Elyan’s body violates not only Israeli and international law, but also the rights and dignity of the deceased and his family.

If the return of a loved ones body is agreed by the occupation, this usually only occurs if family members agree to certain conditions – often severe restrictions on the funeral, such as limited attendance, a nighttime funeral, and monetary guarantees. Families are often also forced to provide guarantees they will not hold autopsies and they will bury the bodies within a certain number of hours, so as to prevent any investigation into the circumstances of the killings taking place.

Many never receive remains, or receive bodies so decomposed and mutilated that they can barely be recognised, not only making identification extremely difficult, but also causing lasting pain and anger. For Muslims, a prompt burial is very important, and is not only seen as a way of honouring the deceased, but also of allowing the soul to move into the afterlife.

No healing without a burial

Issam Aruri, director of JLAC, says that as in all cultures, religions, and beliefs, the funerals, burial and the practices that follow are also part of the healing process for families and friends to start a new chapter in their lives:

According to Aruri, there can be a long-lasting psychological toll on families of those whose bodies are being withheld, especially if they have no gravesite to visit, or if they are forced into restricted conditions for a funeral. He said that:

When you have a body that you didn’t see or touch or having a last look at, you feel stuck somewhere – you feel guilty if you go to a party, you remember them during a family dinner or other occasions. Many families believe that their beloved ones didn’t die, and they keep waiting that some day or night they will be released and knock the door.

Once, when we succeeded in the release of a few bodies, one of them after 7 years, we went to show our condolences to the family, and the father told us: ‘I cant thank you enough, because for the first time in 7 years my wife slept a whole night. For 7 years she kept having a nightmare, waking up at night because she imagined that our son was screaming somewhere, under torture’.

There is no healing without a burial and all the accompanying processes.

Withholding of bodies is also used as collective punishment: a war crime

In addition to acting as a tool for political bargaining, this policy is a means of collective punishment, as each body represents a family torn apart by doubled grief, a community deprived of closure, a culture denied the rites vital to religious and social healing, and by withholding the bodies of Palestinian children, the occupation knows it can significantly increase the trauma it inflicts on the relevant families.

Khaled Quzmar, director of Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) told the Canary:

Israeli media have announced many times that it’s a kind of punishment for the family. It is also meant to be a deterrent, a message to all the other children, who are thinking of doing any action against Israel, that he is going to pay the price by subjecting the family to collective punishment like house demolition, attacks, prison, and also by keeping the body of their child.

He explained that children are always considered children, and never criminals, in international law. Even if they have committed the crime of killing someone, in court they will be considered a victim of certain circumstances, a victim in need of protection, rehabilitation, and reintegration into society, rather than a criminal deserving of punishment. But things are different for Palestinian children.

Quzmar said that:

The ICJ concluded that the occupation is illegal. To those who are attacked and killed by Israel, it is not only a war crime, but a crime against humanity and, in the case of children, it violates the Israeli obligation under the Child Rights Convention, which it signed and adopted. This behaviour is not happening to Israeli children, only against the Palestinian children, and by attacking them, detaining them, and withholding their bodies, I can say it is double or triple crimes that are committed against the child and against his family. Not one of those children are being treated as a human being, as a child, according to the law, but are all subject to the mentality of the Israeli army.

Israel violations of international law – yet again

International law proscribes collective punishment of civilians, cruel treatment of the dead, and enforced disappearance, which are all applicable here. International law, with the Geneva Conventions, demands prompt return, identification, and dignified burial of the dead. The UN Human Rights Council and international commission have condemned the Israeli occupation’s policy of withholding the bodies of Palestinian martyrs, viewing it as a violation of humanitarian principles, and explicitly recognising the practice as a form of psychological torture.

Despite legal setbacks, Palestinian civil society continues to resist through organisations such as JLAC, and seeks dignity beyond death by launching vigils, protests, and legal petitions. Each recovered body is not only a personal closure, but a collective act of resistance against the erasure of memory.

To learn more, read JLAC’s excellent publication titled The Warmth of our Sons.

Featured image via JLAC and additional images and video supplied, or via JLAC

By Charlie Jaay

This post was originally published on Canary.