RAMALLAH, (Palestine Foundation Information Center), The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) and the National Campaign for Retrieval of Martyrs’ Bodies stated that what the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz revealed regarding Israel’s admission of detaining the bodies of about 1,700 Palestinian martyrs, including bodies detained in graves and others in refrigerators, reveals once again the scale and breadth of the policy of detaining martyrs’ bodies as collective punishment practiced by Israel against the Palestinian people.
The PPS and the Campaign explained that this admission is not the first of its kind, as Israel has announced, since the beginning of the war of genocide in October 2023, on various occasions, varying figures regarding the numbers of Palestinian martyrs’ bodies detained by it, including women, children, prisoners, and detainees.
They pointed out that one of the previous admissions admitted detaining about 1,500 bodies, while during exchange deals, the last of which was in October 2025, the bodies of a number of martyrs were handed over. However, the newly announced figure reflects a new rise in the numbers of detained bodies.
The PPS and the Campaign stressed that this rise cannot be separated from the context of the crime of genocide that Israel continues to commit, and the accompanying widespread killings and enforced disappearances, in addition to the presence of thousands of missing persons, especially in the Gaza Strip.
The two sides emphasized that detaining the bodies constitutes a systematic policy in which the Israeli occupation authorities use the body of the martyr as a tool to punish the living, exert pressure on their families, and deprive them of one of their most basic human rights, which is bidding farewell to their loved ones and burying them with dignity.
They added that the danger of the announced figure lies not only in its size, but in its indication of the expansion of the scope of this policy and its continuation.
