No Graves, No Goodbyes: How the Israeli Occupation Denies Burial Rites & Weaponizes Palestinian Grief

Over the course of the genocide in Gaza, the Israeli military, political and media apparatus has worked to destroy Palestinian life forms and intensify decades of oppression and racist practices under retaliatory justifications, dehumanising them to the extent that even their complete annihilation is normalized. The occupation forces exert control over Palestinians, from the before birth to after death.

This report sheds light on ‘death’ not as a definitive line that ends Palestinian life, but as yet another arena in which the Israeli occupation enacts its atrocities and gross violations upon what remains of Palestinian bodies. The report traces the transformations in funeral and burial practices in Palestine, shaped by Israeli policies—beginning with the first Nakba in 1948, through the long history of Israeli repression, and culminating in the updated version of the catastrophe, the ongoing Nakba 2023 – 2025. The report examines the intensified policy of bodily violation and how this violence, now a colonial structure in its own right, has reshaped the rituals of farewell and burial practices for Palestinian martyrs.

Deferred Farewells and Imprisoned Bodies

For Palestinians, death carries a language of its own—an unspoken lexicon etched into the collective memory of a community that has endured the same suffering for ages. The language of recurring pain is understood intuitively, without needing to be said out loud or agreed upon. For them, the painful confrontation with death does not merely signify the ‘end of life’, but the culmination of a phase that gives rise to new beginnings in the liberation movement. The grief within their souls bespeaks the continuation of resistance in another form. In a land where martyrdom is woven into the fabric of daily existence, death is not closure—it is a catalyst. Each fallen body marks not a silence, but a seed planted with defiance, determined to fill the valley not with absence, but with ripened grain.

This understanding is echoed across Palestinian collective consciousness through popular, cultural, and religious expressions that are frequently invoked during moments of mourning and condolence. Phrases such as “Rather, they are alive with their Lord, receiving sustenance,” “Do not weep for the martyrs,” “Martyrs do not die, their blood blossoms into revolution,” and “Martyrs are more noble than all of us,” reflect a deeply ingrained symbolic social code.

This ethos has often served as an impetus for further resistance, resilience, and confrontation. As such, the Israeli occupation has consistently sought to target ‘death’ itself—from its first moment, through its pain and farewell, and even at the brink of the grave. In many cases, this targeting has gone beyond the grave, reaching the remains of the body and the markers of the tomb. This systematic targeting is not confined to a particular historical period in the Palestinian struggle; rather, it has consistently accompanied policies of control and domination. It constitutes an attempt to control the symbolic power of martyrdom, to suppress its potential for renewal, and to collectively punish and terrify both the immediate community and those who come after.

The Israeli occupation’s systematic violation of the most fundamental civilizational norms surrounding death and human dignity — including the withholding of bodies, desecration of graves, and the symbolic manipulation of the dead to punish the living — constitutes a profound inhumanity. By ‘weaponizing the dead,’ the Occupation turns death, mourning, and collective memory into instruments of political control, psychological warfare, and societal suppression.

Desecration, Detention, and ‘Cemeteries of Numbers’

With a long and early history of targeting deceased Palestinians, organized attacks by Zionist militias on Palestinian towns—both before and during the Nakba—included acts of shocking brutality. Bodies of Palestinians were mutilated, limbs severed, corpses burned and dumped into wells and water reservoirs. Cemeteries and sacred burial sites were bulldozed, desecrated, and built over—in Deir Yassin, Tantura, Dawaymeh, and other towns that witnessed massacre.

This war on the dead did not end with the Nakba. It continued, evolving into official state policy following the 1967 “Naksa,” when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. In this new phase, the occupation officially introduced the formalized practice of withholding Palestinian bodies. This policy gave rise to what became known as the “cemeteries of numbers”—covert burial grounds where the remains of Palestinian fighters were buried without names, funerals, or family rites. These numbered graves, stripped of identity and ritual, became instruments of collective punishment, designed to deny dignity to the dead and closure to the living.

‘Smuggling the Dead’: Palestinian Resistance to the Theft of Martyrs’ Bodies

As the years of occupation dragged on and Israel escalated its policy of withholding Palestinian bodies, Palestinians began to develop their own forms of resistance—even in death. These acts of defiance became legendary.

One such episode occurred with the body of martyr Hatem al-Sisi, who was killed on December 9, 1987. To evade Israeli forces, his body was hidden beneath hospital beds at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. It was then smuggled to his family home, which the Israeli military soon raided. In response, the body was moved to a neighbour’s house. Meanwhile, a decoy funeral with an empty coffin was held to mislead the occupying forces while the real burial was carried out in haste.

Another remarkable incident involved the martyr Husni ‘Ayyad, who was killed in a hospital in Ramallah. His body was secretly transported from house to house until a vehicle was secured to take him to his hometown of Silwad. His body was propped up inside the car to appear as if he were a regular passenger. In a five-hour journey through mountain roads, they dodged Israeli checkpoints until he was finally buried with dignity.

These stories reflect how even death under occupation becomes a site of resistance, where grieving families must outwit military surveillance to claim the most basic human right: to bury their dead with honour.

A War on Memory: How Israel Controls Palestinian Death

The pace of body confiscations intensified in recent years. Since the outbreak of the ‘Knife Intifada’ in 2015, the Israeli occupation has institutionalized the practice of withholding the bodies of Palestinian martyrs involved in lone-wolf attacks, turning it into a systematic tool of psychological warfare and collective punishment. Even when bodies are returned, the conditions are deliberately humiliating and restrictive—forced night-time burials, limited family attendance, bans on public mourning, and denial of autopsies, raising serious concerns about concealment of evidence related to use of excessive force or extrajudicial killings. In some cases, the conditions were so dehumanizing that families refused to accept the bodies of their loved ones altogether—such as the case of martyr Ashraqat Qatnani, whose family declined to retrieve her remains under the imposed restrictions.

These strategies of the Occupation reflect a deeper effort to erase not only Palestinian lives but their memory, turning mourning itself into a forbidden act, and death into yet another front in the struggle for dignity and justice.

The Terminal Abuse: Freezing and Deforming the Palestinian Body

The degradation of the Palestinian body—and the attempt to control its final moment—has reached new, chilling heights. Israel now often stores the corpses of Palestinians in morgue freezers for extended periods, and returns them to their families in inhumane, frozen states.

One harrowing case is that of martyr Bassim Salah, whose body was returned to his family completely frozen. His corpse was bent at a 45-degree angle, with his legs twisted at a 60-degree angle—a grotesque posture imposed by prolonged freezing. His family was forced to wait for hours for his body to thaw before they could carry out a funeral and lay him to rest with dignity. In so denying dignity in death, the occupation seeks to shatter the will of the people who remain.

Death as Domination: Israel’s Systematic Seizure of Palestinian Bodies

Between 2015 and 2019, the number of Palestinian martyrs whose bodies were held in Israeli morgues reached 72. By 2021, that number rose to 93, and by 2022, it climbed to 105. In parallel, those interred in the secretive “cemeteries of numbers”—anonymous burial grounds used by the Israeli military—increased to 256 by the end of 2022.

Even more disturbing is the fate of 121 martyrs whose bodies have been declared “missing” by the Israeli authorities. The official explanation? That private companies contracted to bury the dead went out of business and disposed of their archives—an excuse that reeks of institutional negligence at best, and intentional erasure at worst.

The numbers speak to a grim truth: the Israeli occupation treats death itself as a battlefield. The manipulation of death, the degradation of the body and soul, the confiscation of mourning and farewell—these are not isolated incidents but a systematic policy. Alongside home demolitions, mass arrests, land confiscation, and forced displacement, this strategy is part of a colonial framework that seeks to sever continuity, erase memory, and suppress regeneration. But its ultimate goal is clear: to extend control beyond life, to crush the collective Palestinian spirit, and to assert an uninterrupted, dehumanizing dominance over both the living and the dead.

Erasure Through Annihilation: No Farewell, No Shroud, No Grave

With the eruption of Israel’s genocide on Gaza—paired with relentless military campaigns in the West Bank—the policy of targeting the rituals of death has reached unprecedented extremes, becoming a structural feature of the Israeli colonial regime itself.

This war on death manifests in five distinct and deeply violent ways:

1. The sheer scale of death—a mass production of loss that overwhelms the living;
2. Brutal firepower—which not only kills but obliterates bodies, making identification nearly impossible;
3. The prevention of retrieval—where bodies remain buried under rubble or stranded in combat zones;
4. The stripping of bodily dignity—socially and psychologically, denying communities the right to grieve and honour their dead;
5. The uprooting of the body from its final resting place—through exhumation, destruction of cemeteries, or refusal to return remains.

Each of these is a weaponized layer of domination, aimed not only at the elimination of life, but at the total erasure of memory, mourning, and continuity. Death, under occupation, is no longer the end—it becomes an ongoing site of violence, where even the dead are not allowed to rest.

The Density of Death: Erasing Lineage, Atomizing Society

The term “density of death” takes on a chillingly literal meaning in Gaza, reflected in the staggering and rapid escalation in the number of Palestinians killed. As of November 2024, the death toll has surpassed 51,000 martyrs—a figure not only indicative of the scale of violence, but of its intent.

Entire families have been systematically targeted, with the clear aim of tearing apart the Palestinian social fabric. According to documented figures, 1,410 families—comprising 5,444 individuals—have been completely erased from the civil registry. In addition, 3,463 families were wiped out almost entirely, leaving behind only one surviving member. These families once included 7,934 people.

This pattern of destruction is not collateral—it constitutes a form of genealogical erasure, or what can be described as “lineage genocide”. It is a campaign not only against individuals, but against bloodlines, kinship, and collective memory. By annihilating family trees, the occupation seeks to dissolve future roots before they can even grow.

In addition to the trauma of genocidal oppression, Palestinians began to be confronted with new ways of targeting of rituals of death, such as the disappearance of coffins, the difficulty of bidding farewell to the deceased or praying collectively for them, the impossibility of organising a decent burial ceremony for martyrs even at the level of a small family, and the overcrowding and inability to prepare cemeteries, especially as municipal and engineering services (digging and paving) focused on extracting bodies trapped under layers of rubble and debris.

In terms of the disappearance of shrouds, medical staff and rescue teams were forced to use sheets, blankets, torn clothes, curtains, coloured fabrics, and black, white and blue plastic bags as substitute shrouds—a desperate improvisation to cover the dead and offer them the last remnants of dignity in death. This deliberate humanitarian breakdown by the Occupation is a calculated assault on memory, on mourning, on the sacred farewell. The oppression is no longer only on the living—but on the very possibility of death with dignity.

Silenced Farewells and the Emergence of Mass Burial Practices

Funeral rituals and collective prayers have taken on a new, constrained form—marked by spatial isolation and crowding—as the growing number of casualties has overwhelmed morgues and hospital capacities. In many cases, farewells have been denied altogether, as families cannot identify or even reach the bodies of their loved ones.

The intense, continuous bombardment across Gaza has rendered many victims unrecognizable. This grim reality has forced Palestinians to adopt mass burial practices, hastily burying martyrs to avoid further risks amid ongoing attacks.

Reports also indicate that the occupation forces themselves have established mass graves near hospitals—such as Al-Shifa, Nasser, and Indonesian Hospital—and other newly created military sites. These graves serve multiple purposes: to conceal war crimes, protect soldiers from potential outbreaks of disease, and manage the growing number of bodies.

In these hastily dug pits, bodies are piled under layers of earth—treatment unbefitting human dignity, but tragically emblematic of the brutal realities inflicted by war.

The White Shroud as a Privilege — and the Loss of Farewells

While obtaining a white shroud is considered a privilege, the ability to bid farewell to the departed and hold their whole bodies remains equally significant. The severing of communication lines between families, combined with casualties falling in the streets and public spaces, has made the term “unknown martyr” all too common—and deeply traumatic—for Palestinians.

In the first two weeks of the genocidal onslaught alone, 43 unidentified martyrs were buried. This number surged to 281 within the first three months, and within one year, the total had tragically reached 1,400 unknown martyrs.

This growing anonymity in death compounds the grief and symbolizes the profound ruptures inflicted upon Palestinian communities, where loss is compounded by invisibility and the inability to mourn properly.

Three-Dimensional Firepower: Erasing Bodies, Redefining Death

The three-dimensional firepower—air, sea, and land bombardment—has gone beyond merely causing death, to obliterating the remains of entire bodies. Thousands of Palestinian martyrs have been reduced to scattered fragments, effectively erasing the concept of a coherent “body” in favour of the term “limbs” (أشلاء), a word that has become synonymous with every bombing.

This brutal reality has led to a disturbing Palestinian mechanism for identifying body parts amid this fragmentation—weighing the limbs and determining their affiliation according to the weight of the shattered body itself^[1]. In this context, traditional burial shrouds have completely disappeared, replaced instead by plastic bags, food packaging, and even school bags.

Civil Defense data from Gaza confirms the disappearance of over 2,842 martyrs, victims of high-heat bombs that melt metals and reduce bodies to tiny particles, which scatter like ashes, extinguishing all traces of the dead and their remains.

As for the destruction of the recovery and access infrastructure, it is consistent with the colonialist principle of creating and nurturing chaos, seizing and eliminating stability and routine, paving the way for other forms of domination, starting with psychological control and extending to displacement. Amidst genocidal onslaught, the occupation sought to target the health and services system, cutting off fuel and electricity, bombing ambulance and civil defence crews, and repeatedly targeting previously targeted areas after the population gathered around them.

Even in the recent truce, little relief has been achieved for them. The equipment available to remove the rubble and exhume the remains does not exceed 10 bulldozers across the Gaza Strip, making recovery a time-consuming process that experts estimate could take up to three years to complete.

Here, the occupation treats funerals as an extension of everyday life, directing all its colonial tools toward their disruption. This begins with displacement, continues through siege tactics—cutting electricity, water, and medal supplies—closing crossings, targeting gatherings, and striking civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, funeral homes, cemeteries, and mosques. These assaults have resulted in the seizure of religious and social rituals, including those uniquely tied to women’s roles in mourning and communal support during funerals.

Yet despite this, the pervasive experience of death in Gaza has neither dulled its bitterness nor rendered it an ordinary event for Palestinians. Death remains inextricably linked to the occupation, standing in stark contrast to a fierce collective desire to seize life, cling to it, and savour even its smallest moments.

The social and psychological stripping of dignity from the body—reached its peak during the ground invasion, which dismantled Gaza’s social, psychological, and institutional fabric by targeting every human act that reinforces it. This began with assaults on efforts to assist the wounded and rescue the elderly and those trapped under tank sieges. It continued with soldiers mocking the Palestinian body, extinguishing its spirit through drone strikes, sniping with shells and bullets, or booby-trapping with explosives—often leaving what remains to be preyed upon by dogs.

According to reports, while the ceasefire has enabled the recovery of hundreds of bodies and remains—estimated at 458 as of February 2025—estimates still suggest that between 4,000 and 5,000 bodies remain awaiting retrieval, identification, and proper burial.

The stripping of bodily dignity is closely linked to the Israeli detention of more than 259 bodies from Gaza, with Palestinians receiving no information or details about them. The severity of this situation was revealed after a batch of 88 bodies was handed over to the Red Cross in deplorable condition, packaged in blue bags and without any identification. Many violations were reported, including the theft of skin, bones, and corneas.

In reality, the scenes of martyrs’ bodies lying in the streets, hospital courtyards, doorsteps, alleyways, and beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings—left scattered for weeks and months—that could not be buried by Palestinians due to the Israeli army targeting anyone moving in those areas. This was deeply shattering for Palestinians, stirring fierce emotional reactions to such violently confiscated deaths.

Their longing grew for a dignified death—one that was not anonymous or abandoned by the roadside. Dozens voiced on social media their hopes for a death accompanied by a shroud, prayer, farewell, and burial in a designated resting place, with a gravestone bearing their name and family name, offering those left behind a space to mourn with grace and cherish the memory of the departed.

The final aspect, the uprooting of bodies from their final resting places, has taken three forms: first, the Israeli forces’ bulldozing and bombing of cemeteries under the pretext of searching for tunnel entrances; second, the desecration and exhumation of graves to steal bodies; and third, the theft of corpses from hospitals and medical centers. The latter two practices aim to locate the bodies of Israeli prisoners killed during the massacres, as well as to expand the Israeli organ and skin trafficking network.

The occupation has destroyed 19 cemeteries in the Gaza Strip, exhumed more than 4,300 graves, and stolen over 2,400 bodies from multiple cemeteries.[2] These acts have targeted both recent and historical martyrs’ remains, desecrating their significance and shrines, and severing the psychological connection between the tomb and the martyr’s family. This is part of a broader attempt to assert colonial domination over the land—including its remains—erase memory and place, and impose a form of “double death” on the living Palestinian before the departed.

Faced with this reality, Palestinians had no other choice but to gather the scattered remains of their loved ones, rebury them anew, identify them, and unite them with the remains of recent martyrs. It is deeply tragic to say that the missing Palestinians may be prisoners, martyrs who perished beneath the rubble or in a street corner, or remains uprooted by the occupation—leaving their families without the guidance of a grave, and without a place to express their loss and longing.

Conclusion:

For over a year and a half of ongoing genocide, the Israeli occupation has weaponized death itself—manipulating it for political, military, and economic objectives. Gaza has become a literal synonym for the ‘end of history and life’, as Israeli political leadership seeks to reassert deterrence by saturating it with terror.

In this manufactured abyss, Palestinians are estranged even from death. They try to live with it, but it overwhelms them—forcing many to turn their gaze to catastrophes even larger than they can emotionally process, using them as a means to dull their pain. Some mourn the soul, others mourn the body. Still others are left with neither soul, nor body, nor grave, nor farewell. All carry losses, stories, and agonies too vast for a proper goodbye, too large for any grave, too deep for even death to erase.

In this era of genocide and extermination, the Palestinians no longer simply seeks to live—they are also desperately searching for a death of their own….

NOTE: This text is adapted from original Arabic article.