GAZA, (The Palestine Foundation Pakistan)The Palestinian National Campaign for the Retrieval of Martyrs’ Bodies and the Disclosure of the Fate of the Missing reported that the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) continues to hold the bodies of 735 Palestinians, including 67 children.
In a statement, the committee explained that among these are 256 bodies buried in the so-called “Cemeteries of Numbers.”
These cemeteries are simple burial grounds surrounded by stones and without headstones. Each grave has a metal plate bearing a number instead of a name, and every number corresponds to a file kept by the IOA.
The committee added that since the beginning of 2025, the IOA has withheld the bodies of 479 Palestinians, including 86 detainees, 67 children, and 10 women.
The statement referred to a report published by Haaretz in mid-July, which revealed that the Israeli army is holding around 1,500 bodies of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip at the Sde Teiman military base.
The IOA established what it calls “Enemy Dead Cemeteries” in the late 1960s inside closed and secret military zones, where it buried the bodies of Palestinians and other Arabs it killed, refusing to return them to their families.
Palestinians refer to these as “Cemeteries of Numbers,” as they have no grave markers, only numbered iron rods, leaving the bodies unidentified.
The IOA also continues to hold the bodies of Palestinians at the Israeli National Center of Forensic Medicine (Abu Kabir), where the remains of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces are kept in refrigerators. Their families are only allowed to retrieve them under strict conditions related to funeral arrangements.
In many cases, the bodies are returned frozen and disfigured, making identification difficult. Families are thus denied the right to hold proper funerals or traditional burial ceremonies, deepening the inhumane treatment they endure.
Since January 1, 2017, the IOA has openly used the bodies of Palestinian martyrs as bargaining chips, after the Israeli government adopted what it called a “unified policy” for handling Palestinian bodies explicitly allowing their use for political leverage.
This policy was approved by the Israeli Supreme Court, granting the army permission to detain the bodies of Palestinians and use them as “hostages” for negotiation. It also permitted degrading practices such as collecting bodies with bulldozers, dragging them, and desecrating them on a wide scale.
