The Journey of the Palestinian Corpse: A Mysterious Path and a Stolen Right

On earth, the soil is the body’s inevitable cradle. But, with Palestinian bodies, exceptions may be present. This means a body’s fate can be subject to violations — organ theft and torture — interpreted as final punishment that seals the journey of this body on earth. Such dehumanization may even deprive it of a final farewell, or return to its land— the land the Palestinian stood firm for —  after death.

Martyrdom is a meaning rooted in the Palestinian discourse. By dying for the cause of liberation, sacrifice of life for the sake of principle, or because of the resilience and steadfastness of the Palestinian under such oppressive reality, the unjust killing of the Palestinian is identified as martyrdom. Consequently, Palestinians have a close correlation with the sanctity of burial and mourning, which  has evolved beyond the confines of religious details into a scene of collective national mourning. Reflecting the deep respect for the resilience of this martyr, who endured a bitter reality marked by long-running struggle, in an attempt of dreaming of and demanding a dignified life with its basic rights. 

Collective punishment is among the most severe means  of control and repression, and is prohibited by international law, particularly Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Yet, Israel subjects Palestinian society to such punishment, imposing spares no aspect of life. It is an attempt to subject Palestinian society to a domino effect— punish an individual, and the consequences will ripple through everyone behind them. House demolitions, the Gaza blockade, West Bank curfews and military lockdowns, mass arrests and administrative detention, cutting water and electricity, checkpoints and restrictions on movement within Palestinian territories, and withholding of Palestinian tax revenues, are all forms of collective punishment. What makes them distinct is that they are glaringly evident to the international community, with their daily details and life-altering impacts documented. 

Yet, one of the most significant forms of collective punishment and human rights violations is the treatment of Palestinian bodies in Israeli medical and military contexts, which is often hidden in its details. Israel has blatantly disregarded this provision of the Geneva charter, which states, “Each party to the conflict must take all possible measures to prevent the dead from being despoiled. Mutilation of dead bodies is prohibited.” 

Constant military raids on West Bank cities and refugee camps, ground invasions of Gaza, and torture till death of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, are contexts under which the Palestinian body has been stolen. If taken into Israeli custody, it may undergo one or more of the following procedures，starting with Abu Kabir Institute, the Israeli Forensic laboratory located in Tel Aviv. There, an autopsy is performed on the body without the family’s knowledge or consent. A significant interview corroborated this claim, conducted in 2000 by the researcher and  Professor 0f Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, with Yehuda Hiss, the state pathologist and former director of the Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine in Abu Kabir, who spoke freely, perhaps too freely, about what was happening at the institute he formerly ran. Hiss mentioned in the interview that these operations often involve the harvesting of vital organs from the recently deceased, including the corneas, skin, liver, heart valves, and other organs. The organs are later utilized for transplantation procedures, medical research and training, or army needs. Skin is also sent to Israel National Skin Bank (INSB), a military bank founded by the Israeli Forces and Ministry of Health. 

Historically, the issue of Palestinian organ theft has no clear starting point, but the practice of withholding Palestinian bodies has occurred intermittently since at least 1967. Public concerns over organ harvesting began to emerge during the First Intifada in 1978. At that time, Israel started to represent the Palestinian body as a criminal agent of resistance. With exclusive Israeli authority over autopsies within criminal proceedings, permits for such procedures are rarely granted to Palestinian hospitals. Although under Israeli law, autopsies are institutionalized bureaucratic procedures that require family consent, but in the case of the Palestinian body — especially during the first and second intifada — Israeli military court ruling was the absolute legalization of dehumanization and abuse of the dead Palestinian. That, in itself, is a  deprivation of sovereignty over the dead, added to all that is uncontrollable in the palestinian political and social reality. In her book, Over their Dead Bodies, Meira Weiss writes “Many of the center’s workers referred to the first Intifada as the good days when organs were taken constantly and freely.”

Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazaleh, the renowned former chief health official for the West Bank under Jordanian administration and former director of forensic medicine and autopsies, confirmed in an interview in 1990 with journalist Marry Barrett that, “There are indications that for one reason or another, organs especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half of Al Intifada. If someone is shot in the head and comes in a plastic bag without internal organs, what will people assume? But I think that there was something happening inside of Israel too. Outrage is not only a Palestinian experience.” 

Ultimately, all the previous stands as testimony that reinforces long standing Palestinian claims. Dr. Abu Ghazaleh also leads us to assert that autopsies were conducted not only on Palestinian bodies, but occasionally on Israeli and American bodies as well. One of the victims of dissection and removal of organs was the well known American activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003 in Gaza during the Second Intifada, while protesting against demolition of Palestinian houses in Rafah. According to the Rachel Corrie Foundation, Yehuda Hiss testified that he retained some of her body parts and samples during questioning at the Corrie trial in Haifa’s district court. The Corries had been unaware of this until Hiss disclosed it during the legal proceedings.

After the autopsy, what is the next stop for the Palestinian body? 

If we assume that a body detained by Israeli authorities is not returned to the family, the freezer serves as an eternal form of torture. This approach represents the strategy of necropolitical control. As Jasbir Puar wrote in The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), punishing not just the living but also the dead and their communities, creating a blurry line between the living and the dead. By refusing to return the bodies, Israel asserts power over Palestinian memory, mourning, and dignity, turning death into a further form of subjugation and a deprivation of community healing.

The suspension of death represents a liminal state, where the dead are neither allowed to rest nor be fully remembered through rituals of mourning, functioning as a political colonial tactic that plays a fundamental role in eliminating the community’s attachment to the dead and the collective remembrance of the cause of the Palestinian’s killing. “Withholding bodies, and preventing autopsies, by the freezing of bodies or other means, prevents the verification of circumstances of the killing and holding an impartial investigation,” said a spokesperson from Addameer, a Jerusalem-based human rights and prisoner support NGO. “It constitutes collective punishment of families and the community and is an obstacle to accountability.” 

Palestinian families and human rights organizations have long sought information about the bodies of the dead, viewing it as their last chance to bid farewell to the remains of those who once carried their loved ones’ souls. In 2008, The Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC), in  collaboration with  affected Palestinian families, launched the “The Palestinian National Campaign to Retrieve the Bodies of Martyrs,” successfully sorting and documenting names and basic data on the withheld bodies. Some of the bodies date back to 1949, while others have been taken as recently as a month ago, reaching a total of 580 retained bodies. This campaign serves as a local and international mobilizing tool to pressure the Israeli government to adhere to international human rights law.

These efforts lead us to another stage concerning the Palestinian body’s fate, which is the “Cemetery of Numbers”— exiled graves located in Israeli military border sites that remain inaccessible, even with intensive legal appeals. They are called cemeteries of numbers because they consist of marked and unmarked plots. The numbering of these mass graves is the means used to identify Palestinian bodies, stripping them of their true identities put on tombstones, as is customary worldwide.

Despite extensive legal and advocacy efforts, obtaining this information remains difficult. What Palestinian legal and human rights organizations have managed to document is the existence of six numbered cemeteries in various parts of Israel, including along the Syrian border, the Jordan Valley, the Negev Desert, and Al Majdal Asqalan Town (Ashkelon today). The cemetery located in a valley north of the Sea of Galilee may reflect the state of these cemeteries. According to the Palestinian Campaign to Retrieve the Bodies of Martyrs, this cemetery consists of shallow sand graves, which causes them to erode, exposing the bodies to wild and stray animals.

Regarding the cemetery located along the Jordanian border near Jericho, it contains graves with sequential numbers from 5003 to 5103, raising questions about whether these numbers are part of a continuation from other cemeteries –suggesting a much larger, undisclosed number of bodies – or if they are merely administrative codes that do not reflect the actual number of buried bodies.

The “othering” of Palestinians

According to Meira Weiss, the concept of moral hierarchies is deeply rooted in the Israeli politics of the dead. It is a structure assigned by state and society to categorize the moral worth of the bodies. As Weiss concludes, the Palestinian body is positioned at the bottom of this hierarchy, trailing behind the Jewish soldiers and civilians. In the end, this is an attempt to criminalize this body. In comparison, Israeli citizens are portrayed as the guardians of noble objectives, and thus as victims of unacceptable acts, making it the method of justification for their settlement and its consequences. 

Marginalizing the body is a way of undermining its importance. Therefore, the images of bodies being bulldozed by occupation forces or of the injured being military besieged to prevent medical assistance from the access are intentional representations aimed at devaluing the worth of these bodies.  These scenes are aimed to be captured in live documentation, to normalize the perception of Palestinian bodies as expendable, and reinforcing a narrative that portrays such violence as an inevitable consequence of their being on this land. It can be concluded that this tactic serves as a significant measure in the realm of psychological warfare, backed up by Israeli laws and Supreme Court rulings. 

The Jurisprudence of Palestinian Death under Israeli Policies

The colonial political use of Palestinian bodies to dismantle Palestinian collectivity, alongside the Palestinians’ use of the same bodies to rebuild their national collectivism, dates back to before the existence of an Israeli entity. During the Great Palestinian Revolt between 1936-1939 against the British Mandate, the British authorities utilized the 1936 Defense Regulations 133(3) to temporarily bury Palestinian prisoners who died in captivity. This regulation was adopted and expanded by Israel upon its establishment in 1948. Also, based on this regulation, the Israeli High Court imposed restrictions on Palestinian funerals, stating that the army is authorized to impose limitations on funeral processions that risk “violating the security and public order.” Which includes limiting the number of mourners, midnight burial, prohibition of holding a wake, and imposition of fines on families in case of non-compliance. 

According to the attorneys Noura Erakat and Rabea Eghbariah in their legal and socio-political analysis of Israel’s policies and procedures regarding the withholding of Palestinian bodies, In 2004, the Israeli Attorney General adopted an official policy allowing the state to withhold corpses for the sake of a potential deal with Hamas. The piece discussed that a mass release of Palestinian corpses has never happened throughout the past deals, and that the Attorney General’s policy effectively provided a legal justification that the state could later use to uphold its practices. This framework allowed the state to argue that retaining Palestinian bodies was consistent with democratic and legal norms, lending an appearance of legitimacy to the policy.

The role of the marginalized Palestinian body  should be understood within the context of the genocide on Gaza.

Some may believe that the treatment of the Palestinian body remains the same during the ongoing war in Gaza, under a state of perpetual humiliation. Unfortunately, the answer is no; it is rather intensified to level beyond usual institutional and legal capacities. Gaza is under a state of chaos, with a loss of control over civil society. The disruption of both  governmental and non-governmental efforts has  made it impossible to record the total number of unaccounted remains and their fates.

Media evidence and documentation collected throughout this past year indicate serious violations affecting the cemeteries of Gazans, particularly the mass graves. One well-documented case involves  the Israeli army raid of Al-Shifa Hospital complex in November 2023, where a mass grave has been hastily constructed. Just ten days after its formation, the Israeli military tempered with the grave, and confiscated — perhaps more accurately, stole – bodies. 

Human rights organizations such as Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor have been calling for the establishment of an international committee to investigate the suspicions of organ theft, autopsies, and corpse abuse. According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report published in November 2023, a group of corpses have been returned to the Gaza strip. Their miserable condition made it difficult for doctors to identify what exactly happened to them, but their suspicion of organ theft was somewhat apparent. 

Death, then, is not always the end of body persecution. The last will of a Gazan martyr, Ibrahim Ghoula, resonates as a haunting testament, vividly capturing the radicalism of the Israeli regime’s approach toward the Palestinian body. His words are an enduring record, speaking of the mutilation of corpses and deprivation of a respectful burial in a way that cuts through the obfuscation of mainstream media with chilling clarity. His last words were: “I don’t want to end up in a bag! I renounce everything, except my death… I want a full shroud, 192 centimeters long. And I will not give up my body; I want it whole… I want my arms, my legs, my heart, my head, my twenty fingers, and my eyes as well.  I want to return to the womb of the earth, just as I was created from it, the same earth here in this land. I don’t mind being buried in a mass grave, but I want my name on the tombstone, my age too, and that I am from here, from this slaughtered homeland. And with a plea as bitter as sorrow, I wish for my grave to be in a real cemetery, not in a street or on a sidewalk… as a final wish and a right for us. Farewell.”An Israeli airstrike targeted Ibrahim’s house, resulting in the deaths of him, his wife, and two children, leaving one child, Fatima, an amputee and deprived of her family.

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Editors

Clara Apt, Managing Editor

Jacqueline Tong, Copy Editor